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SEYMOUR DURST

"When you leave, please leave this book

Because it has been said
"Ever thing comes t' him who waits

Except a loaned book."

[

Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
Gift of Seymour B. Durst Old York Library

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2013

http://archive.org/details/howotherhalflive00riis_1

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

GOTHAM COURT.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS
OF NEW YORK

JACOB A. RIIS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS CHIEFLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK
CHARLES SQRIBNER'S SONS
1890

IVi cKM

TROWS

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.

PREFACE.

The belief that every man's experience ought to be
worth something to-the community from which he drew it,
no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was
gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work, made
me begin this book. With the result before him, the
reader can judge for himself now whether or not I was
right. Bight or wrong, the many and exacting duties
of a newspaper man's life would hardly have allowed me
to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts given
me by willing hands. To the President of the Board of
Health, Mr. Charles G. Wilson, and' to Chief Inspector
Byrnes of the Police Force I am indebted for much kind-
ness. The patient friendship of Dr. Boger S. Tracy, the
Registrar of Vital Statistics, has done for me what I
never could have done for myself ; for I know nothing
of tables, statistics and percentages, while there is nothing
about them that he does not know. Most of all, I owe in
this, as in all things else, to the womanly sympathy and
the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever my chief
helper, my wisest counsellor, and my gentlest critic.

J. A. R.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Introduction, 1

CHAPTER I.

Genesis of the Tenement, 7

CHAPTER II.

The Awakening, 15

CHAPTER III.

The Mixed Crowd, 21

CHAPTER IV.

The Down Town Back-alleys, 28

CHAPTER V.

The Italian in New York, . 48

CHAPTER VL

The Bend, 55

CHAPTER VII.

A Raid on the Stale-beer Dives, 71

X CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VIII. PAGE
The Cheap Lodging-houses, 82

CHAPTER IX.

Chinatown, 92

CHAPTER X.

Jewtown, . 104

CHAPTER XI.

The Sweaters of Jewtown, 120

CHAPTER XII.

The Bohemians — Tenement-house Cigarmaking, . . . 136

CHAPTER XIII.
The Color Line in New York, 148

CHAPTER XTV.

The Common Herd, 159

CHAPTER XV.

The Problem of the Children, 179

CHAPTER XVI.

"Waifs of the City's Slums, 187

CHAPTER XVII.
TnE Street Arab, 196

CHAPTER XVILL
The Reign of Rum, . 210

CONTENTS. xi

CHAPTER XIX. page
The Habvest of Tabes, 217

CHAPTER XX.

The Wobking Gibls of New Yobk, 234

CHAPTER XXI.

Paupebism in the Tenements, 243

CHAPTER XXII.
The Wbecks and the Waste, 255

CHAPTER XXIII.
The Man with the Knife, 263

CHAPTER XXIV.
What Has Been Done, 268

CHAPTER XXV.
How the Case Stands, 282

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Gotham Court, Frontispiece

PAGE

Hell's Kitchen and Sebastopol, 6

Tenement of 18G3, for Twelve Families on Each Flat, . 12

Tenement of the Old Style. Birth of the Air-shaft, . 18

At the Cradle of the Tenement. — Doorway of an Old-
fashioned Dwelling on Cherry Hill, . . . .30

Upstairs in Blindman's Alley, 34

An Old Rear-tenement in Roosevelt Street, . . . 45

In the Home of an Italian Rag-picker, Jersey Street, . 51

The Bend, 59

Bandits' Roost, 63

Bottle Alley, . • . 66

Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement— " Five
Cents a Spot," 69

An All-night Two-cent Restaurant, in "The Bend," . 75

xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

The Tramp, 79

Bunks in a Seven-cent Lodging-house, Pell Street, . 87

In a Chinese Joint, 98

"The Official Organ of Chinatown," 100

A Tramp's Nest in Ludlow Street, . . . .106

A Market Scene in the Jewish Quarter, . . . .111

The Old Clo'e's Man — in the Jewish Quarters, . .117

''Knee-pants" at Forty-five Cents a Dozen — A Ludlow
Street Sweater's Shop, 127

Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their Tenement, . 143

A Black-and-tan Dive in "Africa," 157

The Open Door, . .160

Bird's-eye View of an East Side Tenement Block, . . 163

The White Badge of Mourning, 166

In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-eighth Street. An Eng-
lish Coal-heaver's Home, 169

Dispossessed, 176

The Trench in the Potter's Field, 178

Prayer-time in the Nursery — Five Points House of In-
dustry, . . . 195

"Didn't Live Nowhere," 200

LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS. XV

PAGE

Street Arabs £r Sleeping Quarters, 202

Getting Ready for Supper in the Newsboys' Lodging-
house, 205

A Downtown "Morgue," 214

A Growler Gang in Session, 223

Typical Toughs (from the Rogues' Gallery), . . . 228

Hunting RrvER Thieves, 231

Sewing and Starving in an Elizabeth Street Attic, . 238

A Flat in the Pauper Barracks, West Thirty-eighth
Street, with all its Furniture, 245

Coffee at One Cent, 252

Evolution of tee Tenement in .Twenty Years, . . . 269

General Plan of the Riverside Buildings (A. T. White's)

in Brooklyn, 292

Floor Plan of One Division in the Riverside Buildings,
Showing Six "Apartments," 293

<c With gates of silver and bars of gold

Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold ;

I have heard the dropping of their tears

In heaven these eighteen hundred years."

' ' O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built ;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land."

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose ringers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, " Lo, here," said he,
" The images ye have made of me ! "

— James Russell Lowell.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

INTRODUCTION.

Long ago it was said that " one half of the world does
not know how the other half lives." That was true then.
It did not know because it did not care. The half that
was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the
fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able
to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a
time when the discomfort and crowding below were so
great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it
was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper
half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information
on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and
the whole world has had its hands full answering for its
old ignorance.

In Xew York, the youngest of the world's great cities,
that time came later than elsewhere, because the crowding
had not been so great. There were those who believed
that it would never come ; but their hopes were vain.
Greed and reckless selfishness wrought like results here as
in the cities of older lands. 6 'When the great riot oc-
curred in 1863," so reads the testimony of the Secretary

of the Prison Association of New York before a lesjisla-

tive committee appointed to investigate causes of the

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

increase of crime in the State twenty-five years ago,
" every hiding-place and nursery of crime discovered it-
self by immediate and active participation in the opera-
tions of the mob. Those very places and domiciles, and
all that are like them, are to-day nurseries of crime, and
of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.
By far the largest part — eighty per cent, at least — of
crimes against property and against the person are perpe-
trated by individuals who have either lost connection with
home life, or never had any, or whose homes had ceased
to he sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford
what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of
home and family. . . . The younger criminals seem
to come almost exclusively from the worst tenement house
districts, that is, when traced back to the very places where
they had their homes in the city here." Of one thing
New York made snre at that early stage of the inquiry :
the boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tene-
ments.

It is ten years and over, now, since that line divided Xew
York's populati n evenly. To-day three-fonrths of its
people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth century
drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increas-
ing multitudes to crowd them. The fifteen thousand ten-
ant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the
past generation have swelled into thirty-seven thousand,
and more than twelve hundred thousand persons call them
home. The one way out he saw — rapid transit to the sub-
urbs— has brought no relief. AYe know now that there is
no way out ; that the " system " that was the evil offspring
of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a
storm-centre forever of our civ ilization. Nothing is left
but to make the best of a bad bargain.

INTRODUCTION.

What the tenements are and how they grow to what
they are, we shall see hereafter. The story is dark
enough, drawn from the plain public records, to send a
chill to any heart. If it shall appear that the sufferings
and the sins of the " other half,'' and the evil they breed,
are but as a just punishment upon the community that
gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth.
The boundary line lies there because, while the forces for
srood on one side vastly outweigh the bad — it were not
well otherwise — in the tenements all the influences make
for evil ; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics
that carry death to rich and poor alike ; the nurseries
of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts ;
that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to
the island asylums and workhouses year by year ; that
turned out in the last eight years a round half million beg-
gars to prey upon our charities ; that maintain a standing
army of ten thousand tramps with all that that im-
plies ; because, above all, they touch the family life with
deadly moral contagion. This is their worst crime, in-
separable from the system. That we have to own it the
child of our own wrong does not excuse it, even though
it gives it claim upon our utmost patience and tenderest
charity.

What are you going to do about it ? is the question of
to-day. It was asked once of our city in taunting defiance
by a band of political cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth
of life on the tenement-house level.* Law and order
found the answer then and prevailed. With our enor-
mously swelling population held in this galling bondage,
will that answer always be given ? It will depend on how
fully the situation that prompted the challenge is grasped.
":f Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Forty per cent, of the distress among the poor, said a re-
cent official report, is due to drunkenness. But the first
legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore
went deeper down and uncovered its roots. The " con-
clusion forced itself upon it that certain conditions and as-
sociations of human life and habitation are the prolific
parents of corresponding habits arid morals," and it rec-
ommended " the prevention of drunkenness by providing
for every man a clean and comfortable home." Years
after, a sanitary inquiry brought to light the fact that
" more than one-half of the tenements with two-thirds
of their population were held by owners who made the
keeping of them a business, generally a speculation. The
owner was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and
that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent.,
and frequently exceeded thirty.* . . . The complaint
was universal among the tenants that they were entirely
uncared for, and that the only answer to their requests to
have the place put in order by repairs and necessary im-
provements was that they must pay their rent or leave.
The agent's instructions were simple but emphatic: 'Col-
lect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants.' "
Upon such a stock grew this upas-tree. Small wonder the
fruit is bitter. The remedy that shall be an effective an-
swer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from
the public conscience. Neither legislation nor charity can
cover the ground. The greed of capital that wrought the
evil must itself undo it, as far as it can now be undone.
Homes must be built for the working masses by those
who employ their labor ; but tenements must cease to be

* Forty per cent, was declared by witnesses before a Senate Com-
mittee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances
were given of its being one hundred per cent, and over.

INTRODUCTION.

"good property'' in the old, heartless sense. "Philan-
thropy and five per cent.'' is the penance exacted.

If this is true from a purely economic point of view,
what then of the outlook from the Christian standpoint I
Xot long ago a great meeting was held in this city, of all
denominations of religious faith, to discuss the question
how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements
with Christian influences, to which they are now too often
strangers. Might not the conference have found in the
warning of one Brooklyn builder, who has invested his
capital on this plan and made it pay more than a money
interest, a hint worth heeding : " How shall the love of
God be understood by those who have been nurtured in
sight only of the greed of man ? "

CHAPTER I.

GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.

11I1E first tenement Xew York knew bore the mark of
- - Cain from its birth, though a generation passed
before the writing was deciphered. It was the "rear
house,'' infamous ever after in our city's history. There
had been tenant - houses before, but they were not built
for the purpose. Nothing would probably have shocked
their original owners more than the idea of their harbor-
ing a promiscuous crowd ; for they were the decorous
homes of.' the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy
of Manhattan in the early days.

It was the stir and bustle of trade, together with the
tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of
1S12 that dislodged them. In thirty-five years the city
of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a
million souls, for whom homes had to be found. Within
the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington
had moved from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out
of town to be easily reached. Xow the old residents fol-
lowed his example ; but they moved in a different direction
and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings
in the once fashionable streets along the East River front
fell into the hands of real-estate agents and boarding-
house keepers ; and here, says the report to the Legislature
of 1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm,
" in its beginning, the tenant-house became a real blessing

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings lim-
ited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops,
stores, or about the warehouses and thoroughfares, render
a near residence of much importance." Not for long,
however. As business increased, and the city grew with
rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the op-
portunity of their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp
was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable,
which the best thought and effort of a later age has vainly
struggled to efface. Their " large rooms were partitioned
into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventila-
tion, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space
or height from the street ; and they soon became filled
from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from
hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits,
degraded, and squalid as beggary itself." It was thus the
dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into
the world. It was destined to survive the old houses.
In their new role, says the old report, eloquent in its in-
dignant denunciation of " evils more destructive than
wars," " they were not intended to last. Rents were
fixed high enough to cover damage and abuse from this
class, from whom nothing was expected, and the most was
made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order, Clean-
liness, were never dreamed of in connection with the ten-
ant-house system, as it spread its localities from year to
year ; while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation,
and ignorance were left to work out their invariable re-
sults, until the entire premises reached the level of ten-
ant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not,
the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering,
water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy
cellars." Yet so illogical is human greed that, at a later

GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.

day, when called to account, " the proprietors frequently
urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the
condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the
fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was
the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone
responsible."

Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in
the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his
tulips or early cabbages a rear house was built, generally
of wood, two stories high at first. Presently it was carried
up another story, and another. "Where two families had
lived ten moved in. The front house followed suit, if
the brick walls were strong enough. The question was
not always asked, judging from complaints made by a con-
temporary witness, that the old buildings were " often
carried up to a great height without regard to the strength
of the foundation walls." It was rent the owner was af-
ter ; nothing was said in the contract about either the
safety or the comfort of the tenants. The garden gate no
longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell-paved walk
had become an alley ; what the rear house had left of the
garden, a "court." Plent}' such are yet to be found in
the Fourth Ward, with here and there one of the original
rear tenements.

Worse was to follow. It was " soon perceived by estate
owners and agents of property that a greater percentage
of profits could be realized by the conversion of houses
and blocks into barracks, and dividing their space into
smaller proportions capable of containing human life
within four walls. . . . Blocks were rented of real es-
tate owners, or 'purchased on time,' or taken in charge at
a percentage, and held for under-letting." With the ap-
pearance of the middleman, wholly irresponsible, and nt-

HOW THE OTHEPw HALF LIVES.

terly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of tenement
building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court,
where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the
clean wards, the tenants died at the rate of one hundred
and ninety-five to the thousand of population ; which
forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in
41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual
freedom from epidemic disease, and which wrung from
the early organizers of the Health Department this wail :
" There are numerous examples of tenement-houses in
which are lodged several hundred people that have a pro
rata allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square
yards upon the city lot, court -yards and all included."
The tenement-house population had swelled to half a mill-
ion souls by that time, and on the East Side, in what is still
the most densely populated district in all the world, China
not excluded, it was packed at the rate of 290,000 to the
square mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled. The ut-
most cupidity of other lands and other days had never con-
trived to herd mr.eh more than half that number within the
same sj)ace. The greatest crowding of Old London was at
the rate of 175,816. Swine roamed the streets and gutters
as their principal scavengers.* The death of a child in a
tenement was registered at the Bureau of Yital Statistics
as "plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventi-
lated apartment," and the Senators, who had come down
from Albany to find out what was the matter with Xew
Ybrkj reported that "there are annually cut off from the
population by disease and death enough human beings
to people a city, and enough human labor to sustain it."

* It was not until the winter of 18G7 that owners of swine were pro-
hibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the built-up
portions of the city.

GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.

And yet experts had testified that, as compared with up-
town, rents were from twenty-live to thirty per cent,
higher in the worst slums of the lower wards, with such
accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance, by a " fam-
ily with boarders " in Cedar Street, who fed hogs in the
cellar that contained eight or ten loads of manure ; or
<; one room 12 x 12 with five families living in it, com-
prising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with
only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table."
The rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the
present day, though the hog at least lias been eliminated.

Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these
were evils "of a day that is happily past and may safely be
forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances
of tenement-house life that came under my notice. One
was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street, from ap-
pearances uiie of the original tenant-houses that made
their owners rich. The fire hiade homeless ten families,
who had paid an average of §5 a month for their mean
little cubby-holes. The owner himself told me that it was
fully insured for $800, though it brought him in $600 a
year rent. lie evidently considered himself especially
entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property.
Another was the case of a hard-working family of man
and wife, young people from the old country, who took
poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they
were " tired." There was no other explanation, and none
was needed when I stood in the room in which they had
lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a sin-
gle window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to
belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough to
turn around in they had begn compelled to pay five dollars
and a half a month in advance. There were four such

ITOW THE OTHER HALE LIVES.

rooms in that attic, and together they brought in as much
as many a handsome little cottage, in a pleasant part of

Brooklyn. The third in-
stance was that of a colored
family of husband, wife,
and baby in a wretched
rear rookery in West Third
Street. Their rent was
eight dollars and a half
for a single room on the
top-story, so small that I
was unable to get a photo-
graph of it even by plac-
ing the camera outside the
open door. Three short
steps across either way
would have measured its
full extent.

There was just one ex-
cuse for the early tene-
ment-house builders, and
their successors may plead
it with nearly as good
right for what it is worth.
" Such," says an official re-
port, "is the lack of house-
room in the city that any
kind of tenement can be
lodgers, if there is space
offered." Thousands were living in cellars. There were

* This " unventilated and fever-breeding structure " the year after
it was built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then just organ-
ized, and presented to the Citizens' Association of New York as a speci-

TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES
ON EACH FLAT.*

D, dark. L, light. H, halls.

immediately crowded with

GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.

three hundred underground lodging-houses in the city
when the Health Department was organized. Some fif-
teen years before that the old Baptist Church in Mul-
berry Street, just off Chatham Street, had been sold, and
the rear half of the frame structure had been converted
into tenements that with their swarming population be-
came the scandal even of that reckless age. The wretch-
ed pile harbored no less than forty families, and the
annual rate of deaths to the population was officially
stated to be 75 in 1,000. These tenements were an ex-
treme type of very many, for the big barracks had by
this time spread east and west and far up the island into
the sparsely settled wards. "Whether or not the title was
clear to the land upon which they were built was of
less account than that the rents were collected. If there
were damages to pay, the tenant had to foot them. Cases
were " very frequent when property was in litigation, and
two or three different parties were collecting rents." Of
course under such circumstances " no repairs were ever
made.''

The climax had been reached. The situation was summed
up by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of
the Poor in these words : " Crazy old buildings, crowded
rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leak-
ing garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables * converted into
dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habi-

men "multiple domicile" in a desirable street, with the following
comment: "Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one bedrooms,
and only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the ad-
mission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting- and liv-
ing-room ; being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The living-
rooms are but 10 x 12 feet ; the bedrooms 6| x 7 feet."

* "A lot 50x60, contained twenty stables, rented for dwellings at
$15 a year each ; cost of the whole $600."

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

tations of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy,
Christian city." " The city," says its historian, Mrs. Mar-
tha Lamb, commenting on the era of aqueduct building
between 1835 and 1815, " was a general asylum for va-
grants." Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such
" home " conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime
increased fearfully year by year. The Children's Aid
Society and kindred philanthropic organizations were yet
unborn, but in the city directory was to be found the ad-
dress of the " American Society for the Promotion of Ed-
ucation in Africa."

CHAPTER II.

THE AWAKENING.

THE dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowl-
edge of the harvest tield that awaited the plague in
New York's slums, pricked the conscience of the commu-
nity into action soon after the close of the war. A citizens'
movement resulted in the organization of a Board of
Health and the adoption of the " Tenement-House Act"
of 18G7, the first step toward remedial legislation. xV thor-
ough canvass of the tenements had heen begun already in
the previous year ; but the cholera first, and next a scourge
of small-pox, delayed the work, while emphasizing the
need of it, so that it was 1SG0 before it got fairly under
way and began to tell. The dark bedroom fell under the
ban first. In that year the Board ordered the cutting of
more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms,
chiefly for ventilation — for little or no light was to be had
from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The
saw had a job all that summer ; by early fall nearly all
the orders had been carried out. Xot without opposition ;
obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the
one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in
every order to repair or clean up only an item of added
expense to diminish their income from the rent ; on the
other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after
a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their
surroundings, and were at last content to remain there.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat ready
and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds. Already
it taxed the city heavily for the support of its jails and
charities. The basis of opposition, curiously enough, was
the same at both extremes ; owner and tenant alike con-
sidered official interference an infringement of personal
rights, and a hardship. It took long years of weary labor
to make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of
the dens as it could reach at all. Not until five years
after did the department succeed at last in ousting the
"cave-dwellers" and closing some five hundred and fifty
cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below
tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. In
many instances the police had to drag the tenants out by
force.

The work went on ; but the need of it only grew with
the effort. The Sanitarians were following up an evil that
grew faster than they went ; like a fire, it could only be
headed off, not chased, with success. Official reports,
read in the churches in 1879, characterized the younger
criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and
unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings, brought up in " an at-
mosphere of actual darkness, moral and physical." This
after the saw had been busy in the dark corners ten years !
" If we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures
in their tenements," said a well-known physician, " it
would show itseif to be fouler than the mud of the gut-
ters." Little improvement was apparent despite all that
had been done. " The new tenements, that have been re-
cently built, have been usually as badly planned as the
old, with dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet cel-
lars, where extreme overcrowding is permitted," was the
verdict of one authority. These are the houses that to-

THE AWAKENING.

day perpetuate the worst traditions of the past, and they
are counted hy thousands. The Five Points had been
cleansed, as far as the immediate neighborhood was con-
cerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing
it in foulness not a stone's throw away, and new centres
of corruption were continually springing up and getting
the upper hand whenever vigilance was relaxed for ever
so short a time. It is one of the curses of the tenement-
house system that the worst houses exercise a levelling in-
fluence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a school-
room will spoil the whole class. It is one of the ways
the evil that was " the result of forgetfulness of the
poor," as the Council of Hygiene mildly put it, has of
avenging itself.

The determined effort to head it off by laying a strong
hand upon the tenement builders that has been the chief
business of the Health Board of recent years, dates from
this period. The era of the air-shaft has not solved the
problem of: housing the poor, but it has made good use of
limited opportunities. Over the new houses sanitary law
exercises full control. But the old remain. They cannot
be summarily torn down, though in extreme cases the
authorities can order them cleared. The outrageous over-
crowding, too, remains. It is characteristic of the tene-
ments. Poverty, their badge and typical condition, in-
vites— compels it. All efforts to abate it result only in
temporary relief. As long as they exist it will exist with
them. And the tenements will exist in New York for-
ever.

To-day, what is a tenement ? The law defines it as a
house " occupied by three or more families, living inde-
pendently and doing their cooking on the premises ; or by
more than two families on a, floor, so living and cooking
2

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards,
etc." That is the legal meaning, and includes flats and
apartment-houses, with which we have nothing to do. In
its narrower sense the typical tene-
ment was thus described when last
arraigned before the bar of public
justice: "It is generally a brick
building from four to six stories
high on the street, frequently with
a store on the first floor which,
when used for the sale of liquor, has
a side opening for
the benefit of the
inmates and to
evade the Sun-
day law; four
families occupy
each floor, and a
set of rooms con-
sists of one or two
dark closets, used
as bedrooms, with
a living room
twelve feet by
ten. The stair-
case is too often

TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE. BIRTH OF THE AIR-SHAFT. ft dai'k Well in tllG

centre of the

house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each
family being separated from the other by partitions. Fre-
quently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building
of three stories high with two families on a floor." The
picture is nearly as true to-day as ten years ago, and will be

THE AWAKENING.

for a long time to come. The dim light admitted by the
air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tene-
ments are still " good property," and the poverty of the
poor man his destruction. A barrack down town where he
has to live because he is poor brings in a third more rent
than a decent flat house in Harlem. The statement once
made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children
had been found in one tenement. It no longer excites
even passing attention, when the sanitary police report
counting 101 adults and 91 children in a Crosby Street
house, one of twins, built together. The children in
the other, if I am not mistaken, numbered 89, a total
of 180 for two tenements ! Or when a midnight inspec-
tion in Mulberry Street unearths a hundred and fifty
" lodgers" sleeping on filthy floors in two buildings.
Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and mosaic
vestibule floors, the water does not rise in summer to the
second story, while the beer flows unchecked to the all-
night picnics on the roof. The saloon with the side-door
and the landlord divide the prosperity of the place be-
tween them, and the tenant, in sullen submission, foots
the bills.

"Where are the tenements of to-day ? Say rather :
where are they not ? In fifty years they have crept up
from the Fourth Ward slums and the Five Points the
whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annexed
District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower
wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground un-
claimed ; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain
tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem
with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within
their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold
them at their mercy in the* day of mob-rule and wrath.

20 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades,
and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admis-
sions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected.
The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-
fourths of its population. When another generation shall
have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army
of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home
shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be ?

CHAPTER ILL

THE MIXED CROWD.

WHEN once I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth
Ward alley how many people might be Hying in it
I was told : One hundred and forty families, one hundred
Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two that spoke the German
tongue. Barring the agent herself, there was not a native-
born individual in the court. The answer was characteris-
tic of the cosmopolitan character of lower Is ew York, very
nearly so of the whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and
courts. One may find for the asking an Italian, a German,
a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandina-
vian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. Even the Arab, who
peddles " holy earth " from the Battery as a direct importa-
tion from Jerusalem, has his exclusive' preserves at the
lower end of Washington Street. The one thing you shall
vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctive-
ly American community. There is none ; certainly not
among the tenements. Where have they gone to, the old
inhabitants? I put the question to one who might fairly
be presumed to be of the number, since I had found him
sighing for the " good old days " when the legend " no
Irish need apply" was familiar in the advertising columns
of the newspapers. He looked at me with a puzzled air.
" I don't know," he said. " I wish I did. Some went to
California in '49, some to flie war and never came back.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or somewhere.
I don't see them 'round here."

Whatever the merit of the good man's conjectures, his
eves did not deceive him. They are not here. In their
place has come this queer conglomerate mass of heterogene-
ous elements, ever striving and working like whiskey and
water in one glass, and with the like result : final union
and a prevailing taint of whiskey. The once unwelcome
Irishman has been followed in his turn by the Italian, the
Russian Jew, and the Chinaman, and has himself taken a
hand at opposition, quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual,
against these later hordes. Wherever these have gone
they have crowded him out, possessing the block, the
street, the ward with their denser swarms. But the Irish-
man's revenge is complete. Victorious in defeat over his
recent as over his more ancient foe, the one who opposed
his coming no less than the one who drove him out, he
dictates to both their politics, and, secure in possession of
the offices, returns the native his greeting with interest,
while collecting the rents of the Italian whose house he
has bought with the profits of his saloon. As a landlord
he is picturesquely autocratic. An amusing instance of his
methods came under my notice while writing these lines.
An inspector of the Health Department found an Italian
family paying a man with a Celtic name twenty-five
dollars a month xor three small rooms in a ramshackle
rear tenement — more than twice what they were worth
— and expressed his astonishment to the tenant, an ig-
norant Sicilian laborer. He replied that he had once
asked the landlord to reduce the rent, but he would not
do it.

" Well ! What did he say ? " asked the inspector.

'; 6 Damma, man ! ' he said ; ' if you speaka thata way to

THE MIXED CROWD.

me, I fira you and your tilings in the streeta.' " And the
frightened Italian paid the rent.

In justice to the Irish landlord it must be said that like
an apt pupil he was merely showing forth the result of
the schooling he had received, re-enacting, in his own way,
the scheme of the tenements. It is only his frankness that
shocks. The Irishman does not naturally take kindly to
tenement life, though with characteristic versatility he
adapts himself to its conditions at once. It does viol-
ence, nevertheless, to the best that is in him, and for
that very reason of all who come within its sphere soonest
corrupts him. The result is a sediment, the product of
more than a generation in the city's slums, that, as distin-
guished from the larger body of his class, justly ranks at
the foot of tenement dwellers, the so-called "low Irish/'

It is not to be assumed, of course, that the whole body
of the population living in the tenements, of which Xew
Yorkers are in the habit o£ speaking vaguely as " the
poor,'' or even the larger part of it, is to be classed as
vicious or as poor in the sense of verging on beggary.

New York's wage-earners have no other place to live,
more is the pity. They are truly poor for having no better
homes ; waxing poorer in purse as the exorbitant rents to
which they are tied, as ever was serf to soil, keep rising.
The wonder is that they are not all corrupted, and speedily,
by their surroundings. If, on the contrary, there be a
steady working up, if not out of the slough, the fact is a
powerful argument for the optimist's belief that the
world is, after all, growing better, not worse, and would go
far toward disarming apprehension, were it not for the
steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its con-
stant menace. Such an impulse toward better things there
certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago,

IIOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the
thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day.*

The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating
into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his
black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in
which a few years ago he was an intruder. The Irish
hod-carrier in the second generation has become a brick-
layer, if not the Alderman of his ward, while the Chinese
coolie is in almost exclusive possession of the laundry bus-
iness. The reason is obvious. The poorest immigrant
comes here with the purpose and ambition to better him-
self and, given half a chance, might be reasonably expected
to make the most of it. To the false plea that he prefers
the squalid homes in which his kind are housed there
could be no better answer. The truth is, his half change
has too Ions; been wanting, and for the bad result he has
been unjustly blamed.

As emigration from east to west follows the latitude,
so does the foreign influx in New York distribute itself
along certain well-defined lines that waver and break only
under the stronger pressure of a more gregarious race or
the encroachments of inexorable business. A feeling of
dependence upon mutual effort, natural to strangers in
a strange land, unacquainted with its language and cus-
toms, sufficiently accounts for this.

The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant. All-
pervading, he shares his lodging with perfect impartiality
with the Italian, the Greek, and the " Dutchman," yielding

* The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone, is an in-
stance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during years of
hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a town-
ship in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a
body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there.

THE MIXED CROWD.

only to sheer force of numbers, and objects equally to
them all. A map of the city, colored to designate nation-
alities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a ze-
bra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such
a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish
prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue
for the Germans on the East Side. But intermingled with
these ground colors would be an odd variety of tints that
would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinary
crazy-quilt. From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site
of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers
drained the hills which are no more, the red of the Italian
would be seen forcing its way northward along the line of
Mulberry Street to the quarter of the French purple on
Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and
reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the "Little Italy" of
Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply
defined, weuld be seen strung through the Annexed Dis-
trict, northward to the city Kne. On the West Side the
red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of Thomp-
son Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly up-
town, against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying
his home, his church, his trade and all, with merciless
impartiality. There is a church in Mulberry Street that
lias stood for two generations as a sort of milestone of
these migrations. Built originally for the worship of
staid New Yorkers of the " old stock," it was engulfed
by the colored tide, when the draft-riots drove the negroes
out of reach of Cherry Street and the Five Points. With-
in the past decade the advance wave of the Italian onset
reached it, and to-day the arms of United Italy adorn its
front. The negroes have made a stand at several points
along Seventh and Eighth Avenues ; but their main body.

HOW THE OTHER HALE LIVES.

still pursued by the Italian foe, is on the march yet, and
the black mark will be found overshadowing to-day many
blocks on the East Side, with One Hundredth Street as
the centre, where colonies of them have settled recently.

Hardly less aggressive than the Italian, the Russian and
Polish Jew, having overrun the district between Rivington
and Division Streets, east of the Bowery, to the point of
suffocation, is filling the tenements of the old Seventh
Ward to the river front, and disputing with the Italian
every foot of available space in the back alleys of Mul-
berry Street. The two races, differing hopelessly in
much, have this in common : they carry their slums with
them wherever they go, if allowed to do it. Little Italy
already rivals its parent, the " Bend," in foulness. Other
nationalities that begin at the bottom make a fresh starj
when crowded up the ladder. Happily both are manage-
able, the one by rabbinical, the other by the civil law. Be-
tween the dull gray of the Jew, his favorite color, and the
Italian red, would be seen squeezed in on the map a sharp
streak of yellow, marking the narrow boundaries of China-
town. Dovetailed in with the German population, the poor
but thrifty Bohemian might be picked out by the sombre
hue of his life as of his philosophy, struggling against
heavy odds in the big human bee-hives of the East Side.
Colonies of his people extend northward, with long lapses
of space, from below the Cooper Institute more than
three miles. The Bohemian is the only foreigner with
any considerable representation in the city who counts no
wealth}^ man of his race, none who has not to work hard
for a living, or has got beyond the reach of the tenement.

Down near the Battery the West Side emerald would be
soiled by a dirty stain, spreading rapidly like a splash of
ink on a sheet of blotting paper, headquarters of the Arab

THE MIXED CROWD.

tribe, that in a single year has swelled from the original

C J CD

dozen to twelve hundred, intent, every mothers son, on
trade and barter. Dots and dashes of color here and there
would show where the Finnish sailors worship their dju-
mala (God), the Greek pedlars the ancient name of their
race, and the Swiss the goddess of thrift. And so on to
the end of the long register, all toiling together in the
galling fetters of the tenement. Were the question raised
who makes the most of life thus mortgaged, who resists
most stubbornly its levelling tendency — knows how to
drag even the barracks upward a part of the way at least
toward the ideal plane of the home — the palm must be
unhesitatingly awarded the Teuton. The Italian and the
poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman does
not rise at all ; here, as at home, he simply remains sta-
tionary. The Irishman's genius rims to public affairs
rather than domestic life ; wherever he is mustered in
force the saloon is the gorgeous centre of political activity.
The German struggles vainly vto learn his trick ; his Teu-
tonic wit is too heavy, and the political ladder he raises
from his saloon usually too short or too clumsy to reach
the desired goal. The best part of his life is lived at
home, and he makes himself a home independent of the
surroundings, giving the lie to the saying, unhappily be-
come a maxim of social truth, that pauperism and drunk-
enness naturally grow in the tenements. He makes the
most of his tenement, and it should be added that when-
ever and as soon as he can save up money enough, he gets
out and never crosses the threshold of one again.

CHAPTER IY.

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

DOWN below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth
Ward, where the cradle of the tenement stood, we
shall find New York's Other Half at home, receiving such
as care to call and are not afraid. Not all of it, to be sure,
there is not room for that ; but a fairly representative
gathering, representative of its earliest and worst tradi-
tions. There is nothing to be afraid of. In this metropj-
lis, let it be understood, there is no public street where the
stranger may not go safely by day and by night, provided
lie knows how to mind his own business and is sober. His
coming and going will excite little interest, unless he is
suspected of being a truant officer, in which case he will
be impressed v itli the truth of the observation that the
American stock is dying out for want of children. If he
escapes this suspicion and the risk of trampling upon, or
being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of
youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exi-
gency and their quick scent of danger direct, he will see
no reason for dissenting from that observation. Glimpses
caught of the parents watching the youngsters play from
windows or open doorways will soon convince him that
the native stock is in no way involved.

Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the
Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps
will take us where we wish to go. With its rush and

THE DOWN TOWN BACK- ALLEYS. 29

roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned the corner
from prosperity to poverty. We stand upon the domain
of the tenement. In the shadow of the great stone abut-
ments the old Knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of
a departed day. Down the winding slope of Cherry Street
— proud and fashionable Cherry Hill that was — their broad
steps, sloping roofs, and dormer windows are easily made
out ; all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly bar-
rucks that elbow them right and left. These never had
other design than to shelter, at as little outlay as possible,
the greatest crowds out of which rent could be wrung.
They were the bad after-thought of a heedless day. The
years have brought- to the old houses unhonored age, a
querulous second childhood that is out of tune with the
time, their tenants, the neighbors, and cries out against
them and against you in fretful protest in every step on
their rotten floors or squeaky stairs. Good cause have
they for their fretting. This one, with its shabby front
and poorly patched roof, what glowing firesides, what
happy children may it once have owned ? Heavy feet,
too often with unsteady step, for the pot-house is next
door — where is it not next door in these slums ? — have
worn away the brown - stone steps since ; the broken
columns at the door have rotted away at the base. Of
the handsome cornice barely a trace is left. Dirt and
desolation reign in the wide hallway, and danger lurks
on the stairs. Rough pine boards fence off the roomy
fire-places — where coal is bought by the pail at the
rate of twelve dollars a ton these have no place. The
arched gateway leads no longer to a shady bower on the
banks of the rushing stream, inviting to day-dreams with
its gentle repose, but to a dark and nameless alley, shut
in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

shelter. The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled
dreams that come to this alley, echoes of the day's cares.
A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hy-
drant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its

AT THE CRADLE OF THE TENEMENT.— DOORWAY OF AN OLD- FASHIONED DWELLING
ON CHERRY HILL.

chance to make the most of it : it is the best it can do.
These are the children of the tenements, the growing
generation of the slums ; this their home. From the great
highway overhead, along which throbs the life - tide of

THE DOWN TOWN BACK- ALLEYS.

two great cities, one might drop a pebble into half a dozen
such alleys.

One yawns just across the street ; not very broadly, but
it is not to blame. The builder of the old gateway had
no thought of its ever becoming a public thoroughfare.
Once inside it widens, but only to make room for a bio*
box-like building with the worn and greasy look of the
slum tenement that is stamped alike on the houses and
their tenants down here, even on the homeless cur that
romps with the children in yonder building lot, with an
air of expectant interest plainly betraying the forlorn hope
that at some stage of the game a meat-bone may show up
in the role of "It.'' Vain hope, truly ! Nothing more ap-
petizing than a bare-legged ragamuffin appears. Meat-
bones, not long-since picked clean, are as scarce in Blind
Man's Alley as elbow-room in any Fourth Ward back-yard.
The shouts of the children come hushed over the house-
tops, as if apologizing for the intrusion. Few glad noises
make this old alley ring. Morning and evening it echoes
with the gentle, groping tap of the blind mans staff as
he feels his way to the street. Blind Man's Alley bears its
name for a reason. Until little more than a year ago its
dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants
of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy, whom every child
in the ward knows, if he never heard of the President of
the United States. " Old Dan " made a big fortune —
he told me once four hundred thousand dollars — out of
his alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow
blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in the end the
chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had
stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his
wealth. Even when the Board of Health at last compelled
him to repair and clean up the worst of the old buildings,

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

under threat of driving out the tenants and locking the
doors behind them, the work was accomplished against
the old man's angry protests. He appeared in person be-
fore the Board to argue his case, and his argument was
characteristic.

" I have made my will," he said. " My monument
stands waiting for me in Calvary. I stand on the very
brink of the grave, blind and helpless, and now (here the
pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of angry
indignation) do you want me to build and get skinned,
skinned ? These people are not fit to live in a nice house.
Let them go where they can, and let my house stand."

In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was
downright amusing to find that his anger was provoked
less by the anticipated waste of luxury on his tenants th°n
by distrust of his own kind, the builder. He knew intui-
tively what to expect. The result showed that Mr. Mur-
phy had gauged his tenants correctly. The cleaning up
process apparently destroyed the home-feeling of the al-
ley ; many of the blind people moved away and did not
return. Some remained, however, and the name has
clung to the place.

Some idea of what is meant by a sanitary " cleaning
up " in these slums may be gained from the account of a
mishap I met with once, in taking a flash-light picture of
a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements down
here. With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to
the house. When the blinding effect of the flash had
passed away and I could see once more, I discovered that
a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze.
There were six of us, five blind men and women who
knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic
room with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

the street, and as many households as helpless as the one
whose guest I was all about us. The thought : how were
they ever to be got out \ made my blood run cold as I saw
the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was
to bolt for the street and shout for help. The next was
to smother the fire myself, and I did, with a vast deal of
trouble. Afterward, when I came down to the street I
told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason
he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoder-
ately at my concern lest even then sparks should be bur-
rowing in the rotten wall that might yet break out in
flame and destroy the house with all that were in it. He
told me why, when he found time to draw breath. "Why,
don't you know," he said, " that house is the Dirty Spoon ?
It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn't burn.
The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered the fire ! "
Which, if true, shows that water and dirt, not usually held
to be harmonious elements, work together for the good of
those who insure houses. v

Sunless and joyless though it be, Blind Man's Alley has
that which its compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It
has a pay-day. Once a year sunlight shines into the lives
of its forlorn crew, past and present. In 'June, when the
Superintendent of Out-door Poor distributes the twenty
thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the
city, in half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise
provide for them, Blindman's Alley takes a day off and
goes to " see " Mr. Blake. That night it is noisy with un-
wonted merriment. There is scraping of squeaky fiddles
in the dark rooms, and cracked old voices sing long-for-
gotten songs. Even the blind landlord rejoices, for much
of the money goes into his coffers.

From their perch up among the rafters Mrs. Gallagher's

UPSTAIKS IN BLINL>MAN-S ALLEY.

THE DOWX TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

blind boarders might bear, did they listen, the tramp of the
policeman always on duty in Gotham Court, half a stone's
throw away. His beat, though it takes in but a small
portion of a single block, is quite as lively as most larger
patrol rounds. A double row of five-story tenements,
back to back under a common roof, extending back from
the street two hundred and thirty-four feet, with barred
openings in the dividing wall, so that the tenants may see
but cannot get at each other from the stairs, makes the
" court." Alleys — one wider by a couple of feet than the
other, whence the distinction Single and Double Alley —
skirt the barracks on either side. Such, briefly, is the
tenement that has challenged public attention more than
any other in the whole city and tested the power of sani-
tary law and rule for forty years. The name of the pile is
not down in the City Directory, but in the public records
it holds an unenviable place. It was here the mortality
rose during the last great cholera epidemic to the unpre-
cedented rate of 195 in 1,000 inhabitants. In its worst
days a full thousand could not be packed into the court,
though the number did probably not fall far short of it.
Even now, under the management of men of conscience,
and an agent, a King's Daughter, whose practical energy,
kindliness and good sense have done much to redeem its
foul reputation, the swarms it shelters would make more
than one fair-sized country village. The mixed character
of the population, by this time about equally divided be-
tween the Celtic and the Italian stock, accounts for the
iron bars and the policeman. It was an eminently Irish
suggestion that the latter was to be credited to the pres-
ence of two German families in the court, who " made
trouble all the time." A Chinaman whom I questioned
as he hurried past the iron gate* of the alley, put the mat-

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ter in a different light. " Lem Ilish velly bad," he said.
Gotham Court has been the entering wedge for the Italian
element, who until recently had not attained a foothold
in the Fourth Ward, but are now trailing across Chatham
Street from their stronghold in " the Bend " in ever in-
creasing numbers, seeking, according to their wont, the
lowest level.

It is curious to find that this notorious block, whose
name was so long synonymous with all that was desper-
ately bad, was originally built (in 1851) by a benevolent
Quaker for the express purpose of rescuing the poor
people from the dreadful rookeries they were then living
in. How long it continued a model tenement is not on
record. It could not have been very long, for already in
1862, ten years after it was finished, a sanitary official
counted 146 cases of sickness in the court, including " all
kinds of infectious disease," from small-pox down, and re-
ported that of 138 children born in it in less than three
years 61 had died, mostly before they were one year old.
Seven years later the inspector of the district reported to
the Board of Health that " nearly ten per cent, of the
population is sent to the public hospitals each year."
When the alley was finally taken in hand by the authori-
ties, and, as a first step toward its reclamation, the entire
population was driven out by the police, experience dic-
tated, as one of the first improvements to be made, the put-
ting in of a k:'nd of sewer-grating, so constructed, as the
official report patiently puts it, " as to prevent the ingress
of persons disposed to make a hiding-place " of the sewer
and the cellars into which they opened. The fact was
that the big vaulted sewers had long been a runway for
thieves — the Swamp Angels — who through them easily es-
caped when chased by the police, as well as a storehouse

THE DOWN TOAVX BACK-ALLEYS.

for their plunder. The sewers are there to-day; in fact
the two alleys are nothing but the roofs of these enormous
tunnels in which a man may walk upright the full dis-
tance of the block and into the Cherry Street sewer — if
he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. Could their
grimy walls speak, the big canals might tell many a start-
ling tale. But they are silent enough, and so are most of
those whose secrets they might betray. The flood-gates
connecting with the Cherry Street main are closed now,
except when the water is drained off. Then there were
no gates, and it is on record that the sewers were chosen
as a short cut habitually by residents of the court whose
business lay on the line of them, near a manhole, perhaps,
in Cherry Street, or at the river mouth of the big pipe
when it was clear at low tide. "Me Jimmy,'' said one
wrinkled old dame, who looked in while we were nosing
about under Double Alley, " he used to go to his work along
down Cherry Street that way every morning and come
back at nignt." The associations must have been congenial.
Probably " Jimmy " himself fitted into the landscape.

Half-way back from the street in this latter alley is a
tenement, facing the main building, on the west side of the
way, that was not originally part of the Court proper. It
stands there a curious monument to a Quaker's revenge,
a living illustration of the power of hate to perpetuate
its bitter fruit beyond the grave. The lot upon which
it is built was the property of John Wood, brother of
Silas, the builder of Gotham Court. He sold the Cherry
Street front to a man who built upon it a tenement with
entrance only from the street. Mr. Wood afterward quar-
relled about the partition line with his neighbor, Alder-
man Mullins, who had put up a long tenement barrack on
his lot after the style of the Court, and the Alderman

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

knocked him down. Tradition records that the Quaker
picked himself up with the quiet remark, " I will pay thee
for that, friend Alderman," and went his way. His man-
ner of paying was to put up the big building in the rear
of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in
front of the windows of Alderman Mullins's tenements,
shutting out effectually light and air from them. But
as he had no access to the street from his building for
many years it could not be let or used for anything, and
remained vacant until it passed under the management
of the Gotham Court property. Mullins's Court is there
yet, and so is the Quaker's vengeful wall that has cursed
the lives of thousands of innocent people since. At its
farther end the alley between the two that begins inside
the Cherry Street tenement, six or seven feet wide, nar-
rows down to less than two feet. It is barely possible
to squeeze through ; but few care to do it, for the rift
leads to the jail of the Oak Street police station, and
therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the
district.

There is crape on the door of the Alderman's court as
we pass out, and upstairs in one of the tenements prepara-
tions are making for a wake. A man lies dead in the hos-
pital who was cut to pieces in a " can racket " in the alley
on Sunday. The sway of the excise law is not extended
to these back alleys. It would matter little if it were.
There are secret by-ways, and some it is not held worth
while to keep secret, along which the " growler " wanders
at all hours and all seasons unmolested. It climbed the
stairs so long and so often that day that murder resulted.
It is nothing unusual on Cherry Street, nothing to " make
a fuss " about. Not a week before, two or three blocks up
the street, the police felt called upon to interfere in one of

THE DOWX TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

these can rackets at two o'clock in the morning, to secure
peace for the neighborhood. The interference took the
form of a general fusillade, during which one of the dis-
turbers fell off the roof and was killed. There was the
usual wake and nothing more was heard of it. What,
indeed, was there to say ?

The " Rock of Ages " is the name over the door of a
low saloon that blocks the entrance to another alley, if
possible more forlorn and dreary than the rest, as we pass
out of the Alderman's court. It sounds like a jeer from
the days, happily past, when the " wickedest man in Xew
York'- lived around the corner a little way and boasted of
his title. One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street
without encountering some relic of past or present promi-
nence in the ways of crime, scarce one that does not turn
up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The Cherry
Street tough is all-pervading. Ask Superintendent Mur-
ray, who, as captain of the Oak Street squad, in seven
months secured convictions for, theft, robbery, and murder
aggregating no less than five hundred and thirty years
of penal servitude, and he will tell you his opinion that
the Fourth Ward, even in the last twenty years, has
turned out more criminals than all the' rest of the city
together.

But though the " Swamp Angels " have gone to their
reward, their successors carry on business at the old stand
as successfully, if not as boldly. There goes one who was
once a shining light in thiefdom. He has reformed since,
they say. The policeman on the corner, who is addicted
to a professional unbelief in reform of any kind, will tell
you that wdiile on the Island once he sailed away on a
shutter, paddling along until he was picked up in Hell
Gate by a schooner's crew, whom he persuaded that he

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

was a fanatic performing some sort of religions penance
by his singular expedition. Over yonder, Tweed, the
arch-thief, worked in a brush-shop and earned an honest
living before he took to politics. As we stroll from one
narrow street to another the odd contrast between the low,
old-looking houses in front and the towering tenements in
the back yards grows even more striking, perhaps because
we expect and are looking for it. Xobody who was not
would suspect the presence of the rear houses, though
they have been there long enough. Here is one seven
stories high behind one with only three floors. Take a
look into this Roosevelt Street alley ; just about one step
wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light
and air — God help us for pitiful mockery ! — from this
slit between brick walls. There are no windows in the
wall on the other side ; it is perfectly blank. The fire-
escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it ; but the rays
of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It
never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned
and man built it. There was once an English doctor who
experimented with the sunlight in the soldiers' barracks,
and found that on the side that was shut off altogether
from the sun the mortality was one hundred per cent,
greater than on the light side, where its rays had free ac-
cess. But then soldiers are of some account, have a fixed
value, if not a very high one. The people who live here
have not. The aorse that pulls the dirt-cart one of these
laborers loads and unloads is of ever so much more ac-
count to the employer of his labor than he and all that
belongs to him. Ask the owner ; he will not attempt to
deny it, if the horse is worth anything. The man too
knows it. It is the one thought that occasionally troubles
the owner of the horse in the enjoyment of his prosperity,

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLE1S.

built of and upon the successful assertion of the truth
that all men are created equal.

With what a shock did the story of yonder Madison
Street alley come home to Xew Yorkers one morning,
eight or ten years ago, when a fire that broke out after the
men had gone to their work swept up those narrow stairs
and burned up women and children to the number of a
full half score. There were fire-escapes, yes ! but so
placed that they could not be reached. The firemen had
to look twice before they could find the opening that
passes for a thoroughfare ; a stout man would never ven-
ture in. Some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at
that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements.
Danger and trouble — of the imminent kind, not the every-
day sort that excites neither interest nor commiseration —
run even this common clay into heroic moulds on occa-
sion ; occasions that help us to remember that the gap
that separates the man with the patched coat from his
wealthy neighbor is, after all, perhaps but a tenement. Yet,
what a gap ! and of whose making ? Here, as we stroll
along Madison Street, workmen are busy putting the fin-
ishing touches to the brown-stone front of a tall new ten-
ement. This one will probably be called an apartment
house. They are carving satyrs' heads in the stone, with
a crowd of gaping youngsters looking on in admiring
wonder. [Next door are two other tenements, likewise
with brown-stone fronts, fair to look at. The youngest of
the children in the group is not too young to remember
how their army of tenants was turned out by the health
ofiicers because the houses had been condemned as unfit
for human beings to live in. The owner was a wealthy
builder who " stood high in the community." Is it only
in our fancy that the sardonic leer on the stone faces

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

seems to list that way.? Or is it an introspective grin ?
We will not ask if the new house belongs to the same
builder. He too may have reformed.

We have crossed the boundary of the Seventh Ward.
Penitentiary Kow, suggestive name for a block of Cherry
Street tenements, is behind us. Within recent days it
has become peopled wholly with Hebrews, the overflow
from Jewtown adjoining, pedlars and tailors, all of them.
It is odd to read this legend from other days over the
door: "No pedlars allowed in this house." These thrifty
people are not only crowding into the tenements of this
once exclusive district — they are buying them. The Jew
runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a
deposit to clinch the bargain. As fast as the old houses
are torn down, towering structures go up in their place,
and Hebrews are found to be the builders. Here is a
whole alley nicknamed after the intruder, Jews' Alley.
But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Isra-
elite with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and
bides his time. He knows from experience, both sweet
and bitter, that all things come to those who wait, includ-
ing the houses and lands of their persecutors.

Here comes a pleasure party, as gay as any on the ave-
nue, though the carry-all is an ash-cart. The father is the
driver and he has taken his brown-legged boy for a ride.
How proud and happy they both look up there on their
perch ! The qur2i* old building they have halted in front
of is " The Ship," famous for fifty years as a ramshackle
tenement filled with the oddest crowd. Ino one knows why
it is called " The Ship," though there is a tradition that
once the river came clear up here to Hamilton Street, and
boats were moored along-side it. More likely it is because
it is as bewildering inside as a crazy old ship, with its ups

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

and downs of ladders parading as stairs, and its unexpected
pitfalls. But Hamilton Street, like Water Street, is not
what it was. The missions drove from the latter the
worst of its dives. A sailors' mission has lately made its
appearance in Hamilton Street, but there are no dives
there, nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and tough
tenements.

Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into
one ? Ko. — Cherry Street. Be a little careful, please !
The hall is dark and you might stumble over the chil-
dren pitching pennies back there. Kot that it would hurt
them ; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have lit-
tle else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter
darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of
stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it.
Close ? Yes ! What would you have ? All the fresh air
that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door
that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark
bedrooms that in turn receive; from the stairs their sole
supply of the elements God meant to be free, but man
deals out with such niggardly hand. That was a woman
filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against.
The sinks are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have
access — and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches.
Hear the pump squeak ! It is the lullaby of tenement-
house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty throats
pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain.
But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall,
is always there. The smell of it has followed you up.
Here is a door. Listen ! That short hacking cough, that
tiny, helpless wail — what do they mean ? They mean
that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door down-
stairs will have another story to tell — Oh ! a sadly famil-

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

iar story — before the day is at an end. The child is dying
with measles. With half a chance it might have lived ;
but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.

"It was took all of a suddint," says the mother, smooth-
ing the throbbing little body with trembling hands. There
is no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the
jumper, who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay
pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight, bitter as
his words sound : " Hush, Mary ! If we cannot keep the
baby, need we complain — such as we ? "

Such as we ! What if the words ring in your ears as we
grope our way up the stairs and down from floor to floor,
listening to the sounds behind the closed doors — some
of quarrelling, some of coarse songs, more of profanity.
They are true. When the summer heats come with their
suffering they have meaning more terrible than words can
tell. Come over here. Step carefully over this baby —
it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt — under these iron
bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded down, despite the
incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken house-
hold goods, with wash-tubs and ban-els, over which no
man could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy
brick-walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored sky
up there is the heaven of these people. Do you wonder
the name does not attract them to the churches ? That
baby's parents live in the rear tenement here. She is at
least as clean as £fte steps we are now climbing. There
are plenty of houses with half a hundred such in. The
tenement is much like the one in front we just left, only
fouler, closer, darker — we will not say more cheerless.
The word is a mockery. A hundred thousand people lived
in rear tenements in New York last year. Here is a room
neater than the rest. The woman, a stout matron with

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

hard lines of care in her face, is at the wash-tub. " I try
to keep the childer clean," she says, apologetically, but

AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT EN ROOSEVELT STREET.

with a hopeless glance around. The spice of hot soap-
suds is added to the air already tainted with the smell of
boiling cabbage, of rags and uncleanliness all about. It
makes an overpowering compound. It is Thursday, but

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

patched linen is hung upon the pulley-line from the win-
dow. There is no Monday cleaning in the tenements. It
is wash-day all the week round, for a change of clothing
is scarce among the poor. They are poverty's honest
badge, these perennial lines of rags hung out to dry, those
that are not the washerwoman's professional shingle.
The true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest
poverty is the clothes-line. With it begins the effort to be
clean that is the first and the best evidence of a desire to
be honest.

What sort of an answer, think you, would come from
these tenements to the question " Is life worth living ? "
were they heard at all in the discussion ? It may be that
this, cut from the last report but one of the Association
for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a lo^g
name for a weary task, has a suggestion of it : " In the
depth of winter the attention of the Association was called
to a Protestant family living in a garret in a miserable
tenement in Cherry Street. The family's condition was
most deplorable. The man, his wife, and three small
children shivenng in one room through the roof of which
the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was al-
most barren of furniture ; the parents slept on the floor, the
elder children in boxes, and the baby was swung in an old
shawl attached to the rafters by cords by way of a ham-
mock. The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give
up that calling because he was in consumption, and was
unable to provide either bread or fire for his little ones."

Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case,
but one that came to my notice some months ago in a
Seventh Ward tenement was typical enough to escape
that reproach. There were nine in the family : husband,
wife, an aged grandmother, and six children ; honest, hard-

THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.

working Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor. All nine
lived in two rooms, one about ten feet square that served
as parlor, bedroom, and eating-room, the other a small
hall-room made into a kitchen. The rent was seven dol-
lars and a half a month, more than a week's wages for the
husband and father, who was the only bread-winner in the
family. That day the mother had thrown herself out of
the window, and was carried up from the street dead.
She was " discouraged," said some of the other women
from the tenement, who had come in to look after the
children while a messenger carried the news to the father
at the shop. They went stolidly about their task, although
they were evidently not without feeling for the dead wom-
an. No doubt she was wrong in not taking life philo-
sophically, as did the four families a city missionary found
housekeeping in the four corners of one room. They got
alon^ well enough together until one of the families took
a boarder an/1 made trouble. Philosophy, according to
my optimistic friend, naturally inhabits the tenements.
The people who live there come to look upon death in a
different way from the rest of us — do not take it as hard.
Tie has never found time to explain how the fact fits into
his general theory that life is not unbearable in the tene-
ments. Unhappily for the philosophy of the slums, it is
too apt to be of the kind that readily recognizes the saloon,
always handy, as the refuge from every trouble, and shapes
its practice according to the discovery.

CHAPTER V.

THE ITALIAN EN NEW YORK.

CERTAINLY a picturesque, if not very tidy, element
has been added to the population in the " assisted "
Italian immigrant who claims so large a share of public
attention, partly because he keeps coming at such a tre-
mendous rate, but chiefly because he elects to stay in
New York, or near enough for it to serve as his base of
operations, and here promptly reproduces conditions of
destitution and disorder which, set in the frame-work of
Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the artist,
but in a matter-of-fact American community become its
danger and reproach. The reproduction is made easier in
New York because he finds the material ready to hand in
the worst of the slum tenements ; but even where it is not
he soon reduces what he does find to his own level, if allow-
ed to follow his natural bent.* The Italian comes in at the
bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he
stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who
" makes less trouble " than the contentious Irishman or
the order-loving German, that is to say : is content to live
in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the hands of the
rent-collector without murmur. Yet this very tractability
makes of him in good hands, when firmly and intelligently

* The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in Harlem
(Little Italy), •which, since their occupation by these people, have been
gradually sinking to the slum level.

THE ITALIAN IX NEW YOEK.

managed, a really desirable tenant. But it is not his good
fortune often to fall in with other hospitality upon his
coming than that which brought him here for its own
profit, and has no idea of letting go its grip upon him as
long as there is a cent to be made out of him.

Recent Congressional inquiries have shown the nature of
the u assistance" he receives from greedy steamship agents
and " bankers," who persuade him by false promises to
mortgage his home, his few belongings, and his wages for
months to come for a ticket to the land where plenty of
work is to be had at princely wages. The padrone — the
" banker," is nothing else — having made his ten per cent,
out of him en route, receives him at the landing and turns
him to double account as a wage-earner and a rent-payer.
In each of these roles he is made to yield a profit to his
unscrupulous countryman, whom he trusts implicitly with
the instinct of utter helplessness. The man is so ignorant
that, as one of the sharpers who prey upon him put it
once, it "v>ould be downright sinful not to take him in."
His ignorance and unconquerable suspicion of strangers
dig the pit into which he falls. He not only knows no
word of English, but he does not know enough to learn.
Rarely only can he write his own language. Unlike the
German, who begins learning English the day he lands as
a matter of duty, or the Polish Jew, who takes it up as
soon as he is able as an investment, the Italian learns
slowly, if at all. Even his boy, born here, often speaks
his native tongue indifferently. He is forced, therefore, to
have constant recourse to the middle-man, who makes him
pay handsomely at every turn. lie hires him out to the
railroad contractor, receiving a commission from the em-
ployer as well as from the laborer, and repeats the perform-
ance monthly, or as often as he can have him dismissed.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

In the city he contracts for his lodging, subletting to him
space in the vilest tenements at extortionate rents, and sets
an example that does not lack imitators. The " princely
wages" have vanished with his coming, and in their place
hardships and a dollar a day, beheft with the padrone's
merciless mortgage, confront him. Bred to even worse
fare, he takes both as a matter of course, and, applying the
maxim that it is not what one makes but what he saves
that makes him rich, manages to turn the very dirt of the
streets into a hoard of gold, with which he either returns
to his Southern home, or brings over his family to join in
his work and in his fortunes the next season.

The discovery was made by earlier explorers that there
is money in New York's ash-barrel, but it was left to the
genius of the padrone to develop the full resources of the
mine that has become the exclusive preserve of the Italian
immigrant. Only a few years ago, when rag-picking was
carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of way,
the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before
they were sent out to sea. The trimming consisted in
levelling out the dirt as it was dumped from the carts, so
that the scow might be evenly loaded. The men were
paid a dollar and a half a day, ^ kept what they found
that was worth having, and allowed the swarms of Italians
who hung about the dumps to do the heavy work for
them, letting them have their pick of the loads for their
trouble. To-day Italians contract for the work, paying
large sums to be permitted to do it. The city received
not less than $80,000 last year for the sale of this privi-
lege to the contractors, who in addition have to pay gangs
of their countrymen for sorting out the bones, rags, tin
cans and other waste that are found in the ashes and form
the staples of their trade and their sources of revenue.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The effect has been vastly to increase the power of the
padrone, or his ally, the contractor, by giving him exclu-
sive control of the one industry in which the Italian was
formerly an independent " dealer," and reducing him liter-
ally to the plane of the dump. Whenever the back of the
sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the
filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eat-
ing his meals under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths
and amid surroundings full of unutterable horror. The
city did not bargain to house, though it is content to
board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield the
food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is car-
ried on at intervals against these unlicensed dump settle-
ments ; but the temptation of having to pay no rent is too
strong, and they are driven from one dump only to find
lodgement under another a few blocks farther up or down
the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patron-
age of the dumps by rival factions represented by oppos-
ing contractors, and it has happened that the defeated
party has endeavored to capture by strategy what he
failed to carry by assault. It augurs unsuspected adapta-
bility in the Italian to our system of self-government that
these rivalries have more than once been suspected of be-
ing behind the sharpening of city ordinances, that were
apparently made in good faith to prevent meddling with
the refuse in the ash-barrels or in transit.

Did the Italian always adapt himself as readily to the
operation of the civil law as to the manipulation of polit-
ical "pull" on occasion, he would save himself a good
deal of unnecessary trouble. Ordinarily he is easily enough
governed by authority — always excepting Sunday, when he
settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad
passions. Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler.

THE ITALIAN IN NEW TOEK.

His soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on
the table, and very frequently his knife is in it too before
the game is ended. No Sunday has passed in New York
since " the Bend " became a suburb of Naples without one
or more of these murderous affrays coming to the notice
of the police. As a rule that happens only when the man
the game went against is either dead or so badly wounded
as to require instant surgical help. As to the other, unless
he be caught red-handed, the chances that the police will
ever get him are slim indeed. The wounded man can
seldom be persuaded to betray him. He wards off all in-
quiries with a wicked " I fix him myself," and there the
matter rests until he either dies or recovers. If the latter,
the community hears after a while of another Italian
affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and
the police know that " he " has been fixed, and the ac-
count squared.

With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian
immigrant has his redeeming traits. He is as honest as
he is hot-headed. There are no Italian burglars in the
Rogues' Gallery ; the ex-brigand toils peacefully with
pickaxe and shovel on American ground. His boy occa-
sionally shows, as a pick-pocket, the results, of his training
with the toughs of the Sixth Ward slums. The only
criminal business to which the father occasionally lends
his hand, outside of murder, is a bunco game, of which his
confiding countrymen, returning with their hoard to their
native land, are the victims. The women are faithful
wives and devoted mothers. Their vivid and picturesque
costumes lend a tinge of color to the otherwise dull monot-
ony of the slums they inhabit. The Italian is gay, light-
hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong way, in-
offensive as a child. His worst offence is that he keeps

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

the stale-beer dives. Where his headquarters is, in the
Mulberry Street Bend, these vile dens nourish and gather
about them all the wrecks, the utterly wretched, the hope-
lessly lost, on the lowest slope of depraved humanity.
And out of their misery he makes a profit.

CHAPTER YI.

THE BEXD.

11/ HEBE Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within
* * hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is
"the Bend," fonl core of New York's slums. Long years
ago the cows coining home from the pasture trod a path
over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still,
but they do not call up memories of green meadows and
summer fields ; they proclaim the home-coming of the rag-
picker's cart. In the memory of man the old cow-path
has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. There
is but one " Bend " in the world, and it is enough. The
city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years
of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much
and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take
its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transfor-
mation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next
block. Never was change more urgently needed. Around
"the Bend" cluster the bulk of the tenements that are
stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the
Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down
the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of
back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which
the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such
shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind
of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of
the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the un-

HOVT THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

clean beast of dishonest idleness. " The Bend " is the
home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker.

It is not much more than twenty years since a census
of " the Bend " district returned only twenty-four of the
six hundred and nine tenements as in decent condition.
Three-fourths of the population of the " Bloody Sixth "
Ward were then Irish. The army of tramps that grew up
after the disbandment of the armies in the field, and has
kept up its muster-roll, together with the in-rush of the
Italian tide, have ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to
all efforts at permanent improvement. The more that has
been done, the less it has seemed to accomplish in the
way of real relief, until it has at last become clear that
nothing short of entire demolition will ever prove of rad-
ical benefit. Corruption could not have chosen ground
for its stand with better promise of success. The whole
district is a m ,ze of narrow, often unsuspected passage-
ways— necessarily, for there is scarce a lot that has not
two, three, or four tenements upon it, swarming with
unwholesome crowds. What a birds-eye view of " the
Bend " would be like is a matter of bewildering conject-
ure. Its everyday appearance, as seen from the corner of
Bayard Street on a sunny dav, is one of the sights of Xew
York.

Bayard Street is the high road to Jewtown across the
Bowery, picketed from end to end with the outposts of
Israel. Hebrew faces, Hebrew signs, and incessant chat-
ter in the queer lingo that passes for Hebrew on the East
Side attend the curious wanderer to the very corner of
Mulberry Street. But the moment he turns the corner
the scene changes abruptly. Before him lies spread out
what might better be the market-place in some town in
Southern Italy than a street in New York — all but the

THE BEND.

houses ; they are still the same old tenements of the un-
romantic type. But for once they do not make the fore-
ground in a slum picture from the American metropolis.
The interest centres not in them, but in the crowd they
shelter only when the street is not preferable, and that
with the Italian is only when it rains or he is sick. When
the sun shines the entire population seeks the street, car-
rying on its household work, its bargaining, its love-mak-
ing on street or sidewalk, or idling there when it has
nothing better to do, with the reverse of the impulse that
makes the Polish Jew coop himself up in his den with
the thermometer at stewing heat. Along the curb wom-
en sit in rows, young and old alike with the odd head-cov-
ering, pad or turban, that is their badge of servitude —
her's to bear the burden as long as she lives — haggling
over baskets of frowsy weeds, some sort of salad prob-
baly, stale tomatoes, and oranges not above suspicion. Ash-
barrels serve them as counters, and not infrequently does
the arrival of the official cart en route for the dump cause
a temporary suspension of trade until the barrels have
been emptied and restored. Hucksters and pedlars' carts
make two rows of booths in the street itself, and along the
houses is still another — a perpetual market doing a very
lively trade in its own queer staples, found nowhere on
American ground save in " the Bend." Two old hags,
camping on the pavement, are dispensing stale bread,
baked not in loaves, but in the shape of big wreaths like
exaggerated crullers, out of bags of dirty bed-tick. There
is no use disguising the fact : they look like and they prob-
ably are old mattresses mustered into service under the
pressure of a rush of trade. Stale bread was the one ar-
ticle the health officers, after a raid on the market, once re-
ported as " not unwholesome." It was only disgusting.

HO AY THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Here is a brawny butcher, sleeves rolled up above the el-
bows and clay pipe in mouth, skinning a kid that hangs
from his hook. They will tell you with a laugh at the
Elizabeth Street police station that only a few days ago
when a dead goat had been reported lying in Pell Street
it was mysteriously missing by the time the offal-cart came
to take it away. It turned out that an Italian had carried
it off in his sack to a wake or feast of some sort in one of
the back alleys.

On either side of the narrow entrance to Bandit's Roost,
one of the most notorious of these, is a shop that is a fair
sample of the sort of invention necessity is the mother of
in " the Bend.'' It is not enough that, trucks and ash-bar-
rels have provided four distinct lines of shops that are
not down on the insurance maps, to accommodate the
crowds. Here have the very hallways been made into
shops. Three feet wide by four deep, they have just
room for one, the shop-keeper, who, himself within, does
his business outside, his wares displayed on a board hung
across what was once the hall door. Back of the rear
wall of this unique shop a hole has been punched from
the hall into tne alley and the tenants go that way. One
of the shops is a " tobacco bureau," presided over by an
unknown saint, done in yellow and red — there is not a
shop, a stand, or an ash-barrel doing duty for a counter,
that has not its patron saint — the other is a fish-stand full
of slimy, odd-looking creatures, fish that never swam in
American waters, or if they did, were never seen on an
American fish-stand, and snails. Big, awkward sausages,
anything but appetizing, hang in the grocer's doorway,
knocking against the customer's head as if to remind him
that they are there waiting to be bought. AVhat they are
I never had the courage to ask. Down the street comes

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

a file of women carrying enormous bundles of fire-wood
on their heads, loads of decaying vegetables from the
market wagons in their aprons, and each a baby at the
breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from
tumbling down. The women do all the carrying, all the
work one sees going on in " the Bend." The men sit or
stand in the streets, on trucks, or in the open doors of the
saloons smoking black clay pipes, talking and gesticulat-
ing as if forever on the point of coming to blows. Near
a particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl with a
string of amber beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her
raven hair has been bargaining long and earnestly with
an old granny, who presides over a wheel-barrow load of
second-hand stockings and faded cotton yarn, industri-
ously darning the biggest holes while she extols the vir-
tues of her stock. One of the rude swains, with patched
overalls tucked into his boots, to whom the girl's eyes
have strayed more than once, steps up and gallantly of-
fers to pick her out the handsomest pair, whereat she
laughs and pushes him away with a gesture which he in-
terprets as an invitation to stay ; and he does, evidently
to the satisfaction of the beldame, who forthwith raises
her prices fifty per cent, without being detected by the
girl.

Red bandannas and yellow kerchiefs are everywhere ;
so is the Italian tongue, infinitely sweeter than the harsh
gutturals of the Russian Jew around the corner. So are
the " ristorantes " of innumerable Pasquales ; half of the
people in " the Bend" are christened Pasquale, or get the
name in some other way. When the police do not know
the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale
and send the name out on alarm ; in nine cases out of ten
it fits. So are the " banks " that hang out their shingle

THE BEND.

as tempting bait on every hand. There are half a dozen
in the single block, steamship agencies, employment of-
fices, and savings-banks, all in one. So are the toddling
youngsters, bow-legged half of them, and so are no end of
mothers, present and prospective, some of them scarce yet
in their teens. Those who are not in the street are hang-
ing half way out of the windows, shouting at some one
below. All " the Bend " must be, if not altogether, at
least half out of doors when the sun shines.

In the street, where the city wields the broom, there is
at least an effort at cleaning up. There has to be, or it
would be swamped in filth overrunning from the courts
and alleys where the rag-pickers live. It requires more
than ordinary courage to explore these on a hot day. The
undertaker has to do it then, the police always. Right
here, in this tenement on the east side of the street, they
found little Antonia Candia, victim of fiendish cruelty,
" covered," says the account found in the records of the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, " with
sores, and her hair matted with dried blood." Abuse is
the normal condition of " the Bend," murder its everyday
crop, with the tenants not always the criminals. In this
block between Bayard, Park, Mulberry, and Baxter Streets,
" the Bend " proper, the late Tenement House Commission
counted 155 deaths of children * in a specimen year (1882).
Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was
68.28, while for the whole city the proportion was only
46.20. The infant mortality in any city or place as com-
pared with the whole number of deaths is justly consid-
ered a good barometer of its general sanitary condition.

* The term child means in the mortality tables a person under five
years of age. Children five years old and over figure in the tables as
adults.

HOW THE OTHER HALE LIVES.

Here, in this tenement, No. 59J, next to Bandits' Roost,
fourteen persons died that year, and eleven of them were
children ; in No. 61 eleven, and eight of them not jet five
years old. According to the records in the Bureau of
Yital Statistics only thirty-nine people lived in No. 59J in
the year 1888, nine of them little children. There were
five baby funerals in that house the same year. Out of
the alley itself, No. 59, nine dead were carried in 1S88,
five in baby coffins. Here is the record of the year for
the whole block, as furnished by the Registrar of Vital
Statistics, Dr. Roger S. Tracy :

Deaths and Death-rates in 1888 in Baxter and Mulberry Streets, between
Park and Bayard Streets.

Population.

Death -j.

DfcATH-RATE.

Five yeai
old an
over.

Under fi\
years.

Total.

Five yea:
old an
over.

Under fi\
years.

Totr.l.

Five yea
old ai
over.

Under fi1
years.

Baxter Street

Mulberry Street . . .

1.918

2,788

315
629

2.233
3,417

26
44

72
130

13.56
15.78

146.02
136.70

32.24
38.05

Total

4,700

944

5,650

132

202

14.87

139.83

35.75

The general death-rate for the whole city that year was
26.27.

These figures speak for themselves, when it is shown
that in the model tenement across the way at Nos. 48
and 50, where the same class of people live in greater
swarms (161, according to the record), but under good
management, and in decent quarters, the hearse called
that year only twice, once for a bab}r. The agent of the
Christian people who built that tenement will tell you
that Italians are good tenants, while the owner of the

BANDITS' EOOST.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

alley will oppose every order to put his property in repair
with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot.
Both are right, from their different stand-points. It is
the stand-point that makes the difference — and the tenant.

What if I were to tell you that this alley, and more
tenement property in " the Bend," all of it notorious for
years as the vilest and worst to be found anywhere, stood
associated on the tax-books all through the long struggle to
make its owners responsible, which has at last resulted
in a qualified victory for the law, with the name of an
honored family, one of the " oldest and best," rich in
possessions and in influence, and high in the councils of
the city's government ? It would be but the plain truth.
Nor would it be the only instance by very many that
stand recorded on the Health Department's books of a
kind that has come near to making the name of landlord
as odious in New York as it has become in Ireland.

Bottle Alley is around the corner in Baxter Street ; but
it is a fair specimen of its kind, wherever found. Look
into any of these houses, everywhere the same piles of
rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper, all of which
the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished
to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a " flat " of
" parlor" and two pitch-dark coops called bedrooms.
Truly, the bed is all there is room for. The family tea-
kettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time being as a
wash-boiler. By night it will have returned to its proper
use again, a practical illustration of how poverty in "the
Bend" makes both ends meet. One, two, three beds are
there, if the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can be
called by that name ; a broken stove with crazy pipe from
which the smoke leaks at every joint, a table of rough
boards propped up on boxes, piles of rubbish in the corner.

THE BEND.

The closeness and smell are appalling. How many people
sleep here ? The woman with the red bandanna shakes
her head sullenly, but the bare-legged girl with the bright
face counts on her fingers — five, six !

" Six, sir ! " Six grown people and five children.

" Only five," she says with a smile, swathing the little
one on her lap in its cruel bandage. There is another in
the cradle — actually a cradle. And how much the rent ?

Nine and a half, and " please, sir ! he won't put the
paper on."

" He " is the landlord. The " paper " hangs in musty
shreds on the wall.

Well do I recollect the visit of a health inspector to one
of these tenements on a July day when the thermometer
outside was climbing high in the nineties ; but inside, in
that awful room, with half a dozen persons washing, cook-
ing, and sorting rags, lay the dying baby alongside the
stove, where the doctor's thermometer ran up to 115° !
Perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city
of untold charities ! Did not the manager of the Fresh
Air Fund write to the pastor of an Italian Church only
last year * that " no one asked for Italian children," and
hence he could not send any to the country ?

Half a dozen blocks up Mulberry Street - there is a rag-
picker's settlement, a sort of overflow from "the Bend,"
that exists to-day in all its pristine nastiness. Something
like forty families are packed into five old two-story and
attic houses that were built to hold five, and out in the
yards additional crowds are, or were until very recently,
accommodated in sheds built of all sorts of old boards and
used as drying racks for the Italian tenants' " stock." I
found them empty when I visited the settlement while

* See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77.

66 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

writing this. The last two tenants had just left. Their
fate was characteristic. The " old man,*' who lived in
the corner coop, with barely room to crouch beside the

BOTTLE ALLEY.

stove — there would not have been room for him to sleep
had not age crooked his frame to fit his house — had been
taken to the " crazy-house," and the woman who was his

THE BEND.

neighbor and had lived in her shed for years had simply
disappeared. The agent and the other tenants "guessed,51
doubtless correctly, that she might be found on the " isl-
and," but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism, and
" not much good," and no one took the trouble to inquire
for her. They had all they could do attending to their
own business and raising the rent. Xo wonder ; I found
that for one front room and two " bedrooms " in the
shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying
$10 a month, for the back-room and one bedroom $9,
and for the attic rooms, according to size, from $3.75 to
§5.50.

There is a standing quarrel between the professional — I
mean now the official — sanitarian and the unsalaried agi-
tator for sanitary reform over the question of overcrowd-
ed tenements. The one puts the number a little vaguely
at four or five hundred, while the other asserts that there
are thirty-two thousand, the whole number of houses
classed as tenements at the census of two years ago, taking
no account of the better kind of flats. It depends on the
angle from which one sees it which is right. At best the
term overcrowding is a relative one, and the scale of offi-
cial measurement conveniently sliding. Under the press-
ure of the Italian influx the standard of breathing space
required for an adult by the health officers has been cut
down from six to four hundred cubic feet. The "needs
of the situation " is their plea, and no more perfect argu-
ment could be advanced for the reformer's position.

It is in " the Bend " the sanitary policeman locates the
bulk of his four hundred, and the sanitary reformer gives
up the task in despair. Of its vast homeless crowds the
census takes no account. It is their instinct to shun the
light, and they cannot be corralled in one place long

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

enough to be counted. But the houses can, and the last
count showed that in " the Bend " district, between Broad-
way and the Bowery and Canal and Chatham Streets, in
a total of four thousand three hundred and sixty-seven
"apartments" only nine were for the moment vacant,
while in the old " Africa," west of Broadway, that receives
the overflow from Mulberry Street and is rapidly chang-
ing its character, the notice " standing room only " is up.
Not a single vacant room was found there. Nearly a hun-
dred and fifty "lodgers" were driven out of two adjoining
Mulberry Street tenements, one of them aptly named " the
House of Blazes," during that census. What squalor and
degradation inhabit these dens the health officers know.
Through the long summer days their carts patrol " the
Bend," scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes, in
sinks and cellars, and hidden hovels where the tramp bur-
rows. From midnight till far into the small hours of
the morning the policeman's thundering rap on closed
doors is heard, with his stern command, 6i Apri jport'1 ! "
on his rounds gathering evidence of illegal overcrowding.
The doors are opened unwillingly enough — but the order
means business, and the tenant knows it even if he under-
stands no word of English — upon such scenes as the one
presented in the picture. It was photographed by flash-
light on just such a visit. In a room not thirteen feet
either way slept twelve men and women, two or three
in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor.
A kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmos-
phere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their
" beds," for it was only just past midnight. A baby's fret-
ful wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the
semi-darkness, three recumbent figures could be made
out. The " apartment " was one of three in two adjoining

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

buildings we had found, within half an hour, similarly
crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there
for five cents a spot.

Another room on the top floor, that had been examined
a few nights before, was comparatively empty. There
were only four persons in it, two men, an old woman, and
a young girl. The landlord opened the door with alacri-
ty, and exhibited with a proud sweep of his hand the sac-
rifice he had made of his personal interests to satisfy the
law. Our visit had been anticipated. The policeman's
back was probably no sooner turned than the room was re-
opened for business.

CHAPTER VII.

A RAID OX THE STALE-BEER DIVES.

MIDXIGHT roll-call was over in the Elizabeth Street
police-station, but the reserves were held under
orders. A raid was on foot, but whether on the Chinese
fan-tan games, on the opium joints of Mott and Pell
Streets, or on dens of even worse character, wras a matter
of guess-work in the men's room. AVhen the last patrol-
man had come in from his beat, all doubt was dispelled by
the brief order " To the Bend ! " The stale-beer dives
were the object of the raid. The policemen buckled their
belts tighter, and with expressive grunts of disgust took up
their march toward Mulberry Street. Past the heathen
temples of "Mott Street — there was some fun to be gotten
out of a raid there — they trooped, into " the Bend," send-
ing here and there a belated tramp scurrying in fright tow-
ard healthier quarters, and halted at the mouth of one of
the hidden alleys. Squads were told off and sent to make a
simultaneous descent on all the known tramps' burrows in
the block. Led by the sergeant, ours — I went along as a
kind of war correspondent — groped its way in single file
through the narrow rift between slimy walls to the tene-
ments in the rear. Twice during our trip we stumbled over
tramps, both women, asleep in the passage. They were
quietly passed to the rear, receiving sundry prods and
punches on the trip, and headed for the station in the grip
of a policeman as a sort of advance guard of the coming

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

army. After what seemed half a mile of groping in rhe
dark we emerged finally into the alley proper, where light
escaping through the cracks of closed shutters on both sides
enabled us to make out the contour of three rickety frame
tenements. Snatches of ribald songs and peals of coarse
laughter reached us from now this, now that of the un-
seen burrows.

" School is in," said the Sergeant drily as we stumbled
down the worn steps of the next cellar-way. A kick of
his boot-heel sent the door flying into the room.

A room perhaps a dozen feet square, with walls and
ceiling that might once have been clean — assuredly the
floor had not in the memory of man, if indeed there was
other floor than hard-trodden mud — but were now covered
with a brown crust that, touched with the end of a club,
came off in shuddering showers of crawling bugs, reveal-
ing the blacker filth beneath. Grouped about a bee— keg
that was propped on the wreck of a broken chair, a foul
and ragged host of men and women, on boxes, benches,
and stools. Tomato-cans filled at the keg were passed
from hand to hand. In the centre of the group a sallow,
wrinkled hag, evidently the ruler of the feast, dealt out
the hideous stuff. A pile of copper coins rattled in her
apron, the very pennies received with such showers of
blessings upon the giver that afternoon ; the faces of
some of the women were familiar enough from the streets
as those of beggars forever whining for a penny, "to keep
a family from starving." Their whine and boisterous
hilarity were ..like hushed now. In sullen, cowed submis-
sion they sat, evidently knowing what to expect. At the
first glimpse of the uniform in the open door some in
the group, customers with a record probably, had turned
their heads away to avoid the searching glance of the

A RAID 03" THE STALE-BEER DIVES.

officer ; while a few, less used to such scenes, stared
defiantly.

A single stride took the sergeant into the middle of the
room, and with a swinging blow of his club he knocked the
faucet out of the keg and the half-filled can from the
boss hag's hand. As the contents of both splashed upon
the floor, half a dozen of the group made a sudden dash,
and with shoulders humped above their heads to shield
their skulls against the dreaded locust broke for the door.
They had not counted upon the policemen outside. There
was a brief struggle, two or three heavy thumps, and the
runaways were brought back to where their comrades
crouched in dogged silence.

" Thirteen ! " called the sergeant, completing his survey.
" Take them out. ' Revolvers' all but one. Good for six
months on the island, the whole lot." The exception was
a young man not much if any over twenty, with a hard
look of dissipation on his face. He seemed less uncon-
cerned than the rest, but tried hard to make up for it by
putting on the boldest air he could. " Come down early,"
commented the officer, shoving him along with his stick.
" There is need of it. They don't last long at this. That
stuff is brewed to kill at long range."

At the head of the cellar-steps we encountered a simi-
lar procession from farther back in the alley, where still
another was forming to take up its march to the station.
Out in the street was heard the tramp of the hosts already
pursuing that well-trodden path, as with a fresh comple-
ment of men we entered the next stale-beer alley. There
were four dives in one cellar here. The filth and the stench
were utterly unbearable ; even the sergeant turned his
back and fled after scattering the crowd with his club and
starting them toward the door. The very dog in the alley

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

preferred the cold flags for a berth to the stifling cellar.
We found it lying outside. Seventy-five tramps, male
and female, were arrested in the four small rooms. In
one of them, where the air seemed thick enough to cut
with a knife, we found a woman, a mother with a new-born
babe on a heap of dirty straw. She was asleep and was
left until an ambulance could be called to take her to the
hospital.

Returning to the station with this batch, we found every
window in the building thrown open to the cold October
wind, and the men from the sergeant down smoking the
strongest cigars that could be obtained by way of disen-
fecting the place. Two hundred and seventy-five tramps
had been jammed into the cells to be arraigned next morn-
ing in the police court on the charge of vagrancy, with the
certain prospect of six months " on the Island." Of the
sentence at least they were sure. As to the length 01 the
men's stay the experienced official at the desk was scepti-
cal, it being then within a month of an important elec-
tion. If tramps have nothing else to call their own they
have votes, and votes that are for sale cheap for cash.
About election time this gives them a "pull," at least by
proxy. The sergeant observed, as if it were the most
natural thing in the world, that he had more than once
seen the same tramp sent to Blackwell's Island twice in
twenty-four hours for six months at a time.

As a thief never owns to his calling, however devoid of
moral scruples, preferring to style himself a speculator, so
this real home-product of the slums, the stale- beer dive,
is known about " the Bend " by the more dignified name
of the two-cent restaurant. Usually, as in this instance,
it is in some cellar giving on a back alley. Doctored, un-
licensed beer is its chief ware. Sometimes a cup of "cof-

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

fee " and a stale roll may be had for two cents. The men
pay the score. To the women — unutterable horror of
the suggestion — the place is free. The beer is collected
from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the saloon-keeper to
await the brewer's cart, and is touched up with drugs to
put a froth on it. The privilege to sit all night on a
chair, or sleep on a table, or in a barrel, goes with each
round of drinks. Generally an Italian, sometimes a ne-
gro, occasionally a woman, " runs " the dive. Their cus-
tomers, alike homeless and hopeless in their utter wretch-
edness, are the professional tramps, and these only. The
meanest thief is infinitely above the stale-beer level. Once
upon that plane there is no escape. To sink below it is
impossible ; no one ever rose from it. One night spent
in a stale-beer dive is like the traditional putting on of
the uniform of the caste, the discarded rags of an old
tramp. That stile once crossed, the lane has no longer
a turn ; and contrary to the proverb, it is usually not long
either.

With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord to-
ward the old stronghold of the African on the West Side,
a share of the stale-beer traffic has left " the Bend ; " but
its headquarters will always remain there, the real home of
trampdom, just as Fourteenth Street is its limit. No real
tramp crosses that frontier after nightfall and in the day-
time only to beg. Repulsive as the business is, its profits
to the Italian dive-keeper are considerable ; in fact, barring
a slight outlay in the ingredients that serve to give " life "
to the beer-dregs, it is all profit. The " banker " who
curses the Italian colony does not despise taking a hand
in it, and such a thing as a stale-beer trust on a Mulberry
Street scale may yet be among the possibilities. One of
these bankers, wrho was once known to the police as the

A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES.

keeper of one notorious stale-beer dive and the active
backer of others, is to-day an extensive manufacturer of
macaroni, the owner of several big tenements and other
real estate ; and the capital, it is said, has all come out of
his old business. Very likely it is true.

On hot summer nights it is no rare experience when
exploring the worst of the tenements in " the Bend " to find
the hallways occupied by rows of "sitters," tramps whom
laziness or hard luck has prevented from earning enough
by their day's " labor " to pay the admission fee to a stale-
beer dive, and who have their reasons for declining the
hospitality of the police station lodging-rooms. Huddled
together in loathsome files, they squat there over night, or
until an inquisitive policeman breaks up the congregation
with his club, which in Mulberry Street has always free
swing. At that season the woman tramp predominates.
The men, some of them at least, take to the railroad
track and to camping out when the nights grow warm, re-
turning in the fall to prey on the city and to recruit
their ranks from the lazy, the shiftless, and the unfortu-
nate. Like a foul loadstone, " the Bend " attracts and
brings them back, no matter how far they have wandered.
For next to idleness the tramp loves rum ; next to rum
stale beer, its equivalent of the gutter. And the first and
last go best together.

As "sitters" they occasionally find a job in the saloons
about Chatham and Pearl Streets on cold winter nights,
when the hallway is not practicable, that enables them to
pick up a charity drink now and then and a bite of an
infrequent sandwich. The barkeeper permits them to sit
about the stove and by shivering invite the sympathy of
transient customers. The dodge works well, especially
about Christinas and election time, and the sitters are able

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

to keep comfortably filled up to the advantage of their
host. But to look thoroughly miserable they must keep
awake. A tramp placidly dozing at the fire would not be
an object of sympathy. To make sure that they do keep
awake, the wily bartender makes them sit constantly swing-
ing one foot like the pendulum of a clock. When it
stops the slothful "sitter" is roused with a kick and " fired
out." It is said by those who profess to know that habit
has come to the rescue of oversleepy tramps and that the
old rounders can swing hand or foot in their sleep without
betraying themselves. In some saloons " sitters " are let
in at these seasons in fresh batches every hour.

On one of my visits to "the Bend" I came across a par-
ticularly ragged and disreputable tramp, who sat smoking
his pipe on the rung of a ladder with such evident philo-
sophic contentment in the busy labor of a score of rag-
pickers all about him, that I bade him sit for a picture,
offering him ten cents for the job. He accepted the offer
with hardly a nod, and sat patiently watching me from
his perch until I got ready for work. Then he took the
pipe out of his mouth and put it in his pocket, calmly de-
claring that it was not included in the contract, and that
it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture. The
pipe, by the way, was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent
kind. But I had to give in. The man, scarce ten sec-
onds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at
which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike.
He knew his rights and the value of " work," and was
not to be cheated out of either.

Whence these tramps, and why the tramping ? are
questions oftener asked than answered. Ill-applied char-
ity and idleness answer the first query. They are the
whence, and to a large extent the why also. Once start-

THE TRAMP.

80 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ed on the career of a tramp, the man keeps to it because
it is the laziest. Tramps and toughs profess the same
doctrine, that the world owes them a living, but from
stand-points that tend in different directions. The tough
does not become a tramp, save in rare instances, when old
and broken down. Even then usually he is otherwise
disposed of. The devil has various ways of taking care
of his own. Nor is the tramps' army recruited from
any certain class. All occupations and most grades of
society yield to it their contingent of idleness. Occasion-
ally, from one cause or another, a recruit of a better stamp
is forced into the ranks ; but the first acceptance of alms
puts a brand on the able-bodied man which his moral nat-
ure rarely hold out to efface. He seldom recovers his
lost caste. The evolution is gradual, keeping step with
the increasing shabbiness of his clothes and correspond-
ing loss of self-respect, until he reaches the bottom in " the
Bend."

Of the tough the tramp doctrine that the world owes
him a living makes a thief ; of the tramp a coward.
Numbers only make him bold unless he has to do with
defenceless women. In the city the policemen keep him
straight enough. The women rob an occasional clothes-
line when no one is looking, or steal the pail and scrubbing-
brush with which they are set to clean up in the station-
house lodging-rooms after their night's sleep. At the
police station the roads of the tramp and the tough again
converge. In mid-winter, on the coldest nights, the sani-
tary police corral the tramps here and in their lodging-
houses and vaccinate them, despite their struggles and
many oaths that they have recently been " scraped."
The station-house is the sieve that sifts out the chaff
from the wheat, if there be any wheat there. A man

A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES.

goes from his first night's sleep on the hard slab of a po-
lice station lodging-room to a deck-hand's berth on an out-
going steamer, to the recruiting office, to any work that
is honest, or he goes " to the devil or the dives, same
thing," says my friend, the Sergeant, who knows.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.

TTJ'HEN it comes to the question of numbers with this
▼ » tramps' army, another factor of serious portent
has to be taken into account : the cheap lodging-houses. In
the caravanseries that line Chatham Street and the Bow-
ery, harboring nightly a population as large as that of
many a thriving town, a home-made article of tramp and
thief is turned out that is attracting the increasing atten-
tion of the police, and offers a field for the missionary's
labors beside which most others seem of slight account.
Within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of
crime by the chief of the Secret Police,* the sort of crime
that feeds especially on idleness and lies ready to the hand
of fatal opportunity. In the same strain one of the jus-
tices on the police court bench sums up his long experi-
ence as a committing magistrate : " The ten-cent lodging-
houses more than counterbalance the good done by the
free reading-room, lectures, and all other agencies of re-
form. Such lodging-houses have caused more destitution,
more beggary and crime than any other agency I know
of." A very slight acquaintance with the subject is suffi-
cient to convince the observer that neither authority over-
states the fact. The two officials had reference, however,

* Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses, in the North American Re-
view, September, 1889.

THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.

to two different grades of lodging-houses. The cost of a
night's lodging makes the difference. There is a wider
gap between the " hotel " — they are all hotels — that
charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a
dime than between the bridal suite and the every-day hall
bedroom of the ordinary hostelry.

The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted can-
dle to the moth. It attracts them in swarms that come
year after year with the vague idea that they can get along
here if anywhere ; that something is bound to turn up
among so many. Nearly all are young men, unsettled in
life, many — most of them, perhaps — fresh from good
homes, beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a
start in the city and making a way for themselves. Few
of them have much money to waste while looking around,
and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object.
Fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls.
They have come in search of crowds, of " life," and they
gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great democratic
highway of the city, where the twenty -five-cent lodging-
houses take them in. In the alleged reading-rooms of
these great barracks, that often have accommodations, such
as they are, for two, three, and even four hundred guests,
they encounter three distinct classes of associates : the
great mass adventurers like themselves, waiting there for
something to turn up ; a much smaller class of respectable
clerks or mechanics, who, too poor or too lonely to have a
home of their own, live this way from year to year ; and
lastly the thief in search of recruits for his trade. The
sights the young stranger sees, and the company he keeps,
in the Bowery are not of a kind to strengthen any moral
principle he may have brought away from home, and by
the time his money is gone, with no work yet in sight, and

HOW THE OTHEE HALF LIVES.

lie goes down a step, a long step, to the fifteen-cent lodg-
ing-house, he is ready for the tempter whom he finds
waiting for him there, reinforced by the contingent of ex-
convicts returning from the prisons after having served
out their sentences for robbery or thefi. Then it is that
the something he has been waiting for turns up. The po-
lice returns have the record of it. " In nine cases out of
ten," says Inspector Byrnes, " he turns out a thief, or a
burglar, if, indeed, he does not sooner or later become a
murderer." As a matter of fact, some of the most atro-
cious of recent murders have been the result of schemes
of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent and
bold have become the depredations of the lodging-house
thieves, that the authorities have been compelled to make
a public demand for more effective laws that shall make
them subject at all times to police regulation.

Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last two or three
years at least four hundred young men have been arrested
for petty crimes that originated in the lodging-houses,
and that in many cases it was their first step in crime.
He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that three-
fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally
petty offences in the courts are under twenty years of age,
poorly clad, and without means. The bearing of the re-
mark is obvious. One of the, to the police, well-known
thieves who lived, when out of jail, at the Windsor, a
well-known lodging-house in the Bowery, went to Johns-
town after the flood and was shot and killed there while
robbing the dead.

An idea of just how this particular scheme of corrup-
tion works, with an extra touch of infamy thrown in, may
be gathered from the story of David Smith, the "New
York Fagin," who was convicted and sent to prison last

THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.

year through the instrumentality, of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here is the account
from the Society's last report :

" The boy, Edward Mulhearn, fourteen years old, had
run away from his home in Jersey City, thinking he might
find work and friends in New York. He may have been
a trifle wild. He met Smith on the Bowery and recog-
nized him as an acquaintance. When Smith offered him
a supper and bed he was only too glad to accept. Smith
Jed the boy to a vile lodging-house on the Bowery, where
he introduced him to his 6 pals ' and swore he would
make a man of him before he was a week older. Next
day he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery
and Grand Street, showed him the sights and drew his at-
tention to the careless way the ladies carried their bags
and purses and the easy thing it was to get them. He
induced Edward to try his hand. Edward tried and won.
He was richer by three dollars ! It did seem easy. ' Of
course it is,' said his companion. From that time Smith
took the boy on a number of thieving raids, but he never
seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out of range
of the ' Fagin's ' watchful eye. "When he went out alone
he generally returned empty-handed. This did not suit
Smith. It was then he conceived the idea of turning this
little inferior thief into a superior beggar. He took the
boy into his room and burned his arms wTith a hot iron.
The boy screamed and entreated in vain. The merciless
wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and
afterward applied acid to the raw wound.

" Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen, and
painful, Edward was sent out every day by this fiend,
who never let him out of his sight, and threatened to
burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough. He

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

was instructed to tell people the wound had been caused
by acid falling upon his arm at the works. Edward was
now too much under the man's influence to resist or dis-
obey him. He begged hard and handed Smith the pen-
nies faithfully. He received in return bad food and
worse treatment."

The reckoning came when the wretch encountered the
boy's father, in search of his child, in the Bowery, and fell
under suspicion of knowing more than he pretended of
the lad's whereabouts. He was found in his den with a
half dozen of his chums revelling on the proceeds of the
boy's begging for the day.

The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pre-
tence of a bedroom, though the head-high partition en-
closing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair
and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shal-
lowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly
forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets
as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the
locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears. There is no
longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there
is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the
lodger. Usually the ten- and seven-cent lodgings are dif-
ferent grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an
apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents
the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky
stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty
box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of
these " hocels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough
timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the
couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the question-
able comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the
revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure

THE CHEAP LODGIXG-HOUSES.

perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals,
but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks,
and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the
boss and his clnb. On cold winter nights, when every

BUNKS IN A SEVEX-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELE STREET.

bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
more than once, and listening to the snoring of the
sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the
slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight,
imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not
favor the deception was the air ; its character could not
be mistaken.

The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was
known to me as a man of reputed wealth and respecta-
bility. He " ran " three such establishments and made,
it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on his investment.
He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish
precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupa-
tion was not suspected. A notice that was posted on the
wall of the lodgers' room suggested at least an effort to
maintain his up-town standing in the slums. It read :
" Is o swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock." Before
nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of
the place ; but that was the limit.

There are no licensed lodging-houses known to me
which charge less than seven cents for even such a bed as
this canvas strip, though there are unlicensed ones enough
where one may sleep on the floor for five cents a spot, or
squat in a sheltered hallway for three. The police station
lodging-house, where the soft side of a plank is the regu-
lation couch, is next in order. The manner in which this
police bed is " made up " is interesting in its simplicity.
The loose planks that make the platform are simply turned
over, and the job is done, with an occasional coat of white-
wash thrown in to sweeten things. I know of only one
easier way, but, so far as I am informed, it has never
been introduced in this country. It used to be practised,
if report spoke truly, in certain old-country towns. The
" bed " was represented by clothes-lines stretched across
the room upon which the sleepers hung by the arm-pits
for a penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them
up by simply untying the line at one end and letting it go

THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.

with its load ; a labor-saving device certainly, and highly
successful in attaining the desired end.

According to the police figures, 4,974,025 separate lodg-
ings were furnished last year by these dormitories, be-
tween two and three hundred in number, and, adding the
147,034 lodgings furnished by the station-houses, the total
of the homeless army was 5,121,659, an average of over
fourteen thousand homeless men * for every night in the
year ! The health officers, professional optimists always in
matters that trench upon their official jurisdiction, insist
that the number is not quite so large as here given. But,
apart from any slight discrepancy in the figures, the more
important fact remains that last year's record of lodgers
is an all round increase over the previous year's of over
three hundred thousand, and that this has been the ratio
of growth of the business during the last three years, the
period of which Inspector Byrnes complains as turning
out so many young criminals with the lodging-house stamp
upon them. More than half of the lodging-houses are
in the Bowery district, that is to say, the Fourth, Sixth,
and Tenth TVrards, and they harbor nearly three-fourths of
their crowds. The calculation that more than nine thou-
sand homeless young men lodge nightly along Chatham
Street and the Bowery, between the City Hall and the
Cooper Union, is probably not far out of the way. The
City Missionary finds them there far less frequently than
the thief in need of helpers. Appropriately enough,
nearly one-fifth of all the pawn-shops in the city and one-
sixth of all the saloons are located here, while twenty-
seven per cent, of all the arrests on the police books have
been credited to the district for the last two years.

About election time, especially in Presidential elec-
* Deduct 69,111 women lodgers in the police stations.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

tions, the lodging-houses come out strong on the side of
the political boss who has the biggest " barrel." The vic-
tory in political contests, in the three wards I have men-
tioned of all others, is distinctly to the general with the
strongest battalions, and the lodging-houses are his favor-
ite recruiting ground. The colonization of voters is an
evil of the first magnitude, none the less because both
parties smirch their hands with it, and for that reason
next to hopeless. Honors are easy, where the two " ma-
chines," intrenched in their strongholds, outbid each other
across the Bowery in open rivalry as to who shall commit
the most flagrant frauds at the polls. Semi-occasionally
a champion offender is caught and punished, as was, not
long ago, the proprietor of one of the biggest Bowery
lodging-houses. But such scenes are largely spectacular,
if not prompted by some hidden motive of revenge that
survives from the contest. Beyond a doubt Inspector
Byrnes speaks by the card when he observes that "usually
this work is done in the interest of some local political
boss, who stands by the owner of the house, in case the
latter gets into trouble." For standing by, read twisting
the machinery of outraged justice so that its hand shall
fall not too heavily upon the culprit, or miss him alto-
gether. One of the houses that achieved profitable noto-
riety in this way in many successive elections, a notorious
tramps' resort in Houston Street, was lately given up, and
has most appropriately been turned into a bar-factory,
thus still contributing, though in a changed form, to the
success of " the cause." It must be admitted that the
black tramp who herds in the West Side " hotels " is more
discriminating in this matter of electioneering than his
white brother. He at least exhibits some real loyalty in
invariably selling his vote to the Republican bidder for a

THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.

dollar, while he charges the Democratic boss a dollar and
a half. In view of the well-known facts, there is a good
deal of force in the remark made by a friend of ballot re-
form during the recent struggle over that hotly contested
issue, that real ballot reform will do more to knock out
cheap lodging-houses than all the regulations of police and
health officers together.

The experiment made by a well-known stove manufact-
urer a winter or two ago in the way of charity, might
have thrown much desired light on the question of the
number of tramps in the city, could it have been carried
to a successful end. lie opened a sort of breakfast shop
for the idle and unemployed in the region of Washington
Square, offering to all who had no money a cup of coffee
and a roll for nothing. The first morning he had a dozen
customers, the next about two hundred. The number
kept growing until one morning, at the end of two weeks,
found by actual count 2,011 shivering creatures in line
waiting their turn for a seat at his tables. The shop was
closed that day. It was one of the rare instances of too
great a rush of custom wrecking a promising business, and
the great problem remained unsolved.

CHAPTER IX.

CHINATOWN.

BETWEEN" the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines
of the Bend, Joss has cheekily planted his pagan
worship of idols, chief among which are the celestial
worshipper's own gain and lusts. Whatever may be said
about the Chinaman being a thousand years behind the
age on his own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in
his successful scheming to "make it pay." It is doubt-
ful if there is anything he does not turn to a paying ac-
count, from his religion down, or up, as one prefers. At
the risk of distressing some well-meaning, but, I fear, too
trustful people, I state it in advance as my opinion, based
on the steady observation of years, that all attempts to
make an effective Christian of John Chinaman will re-
main abortive in this generation ; of the next I have, if
anything, lepi hope. Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere
grub-worship, have left him without the essential quali-
ties for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith whose
motive and unselfish spirit are alike beyond his grasp.
He lacks the handle of a strong faith in something, any-
thing, however wrong, to catch him by. There is nothing
strong about Lim, except his passions when aroused. I
am convinced that he adopts Christianity, when he adopts
it at all, as he puts on American clothes, with what the
politicians would call an ulterior motive, some sort of gain
in the near prospect — washing, a Christian wife, perhaps,

CHINATOWN.

anything he happens to rate for the moment above his
cherished pigtail. It may be that I judge him too harshly.
Exceptions may be found. Indeed, for the credit of the
race, I hope there are such. But I am bound to say my
hope is not backed by lively faith.

Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing. Xext-door
neighbor to the Bend, it has little of its outdoor stir and
life, none of its gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and
poverty. Mott Street is clean to distraction : the laundry
stamp is on it, though the houses are chiefly of the con-
ventional tenement-house type, with nothing to rescue
them from the everyday dismal dreariness of their kind
save here and there a splash of dull red or yellow, a sign,
hung endways and with streamers of red flannel tacked
on, that announces in Chinese characters that Dr. Chay
Yen Chong sells Chinese herb medicines, or that "Won
Lung & Co. — queer contradiction — take in washing, or
deal out tea and groceries. There are some gimcracks
in the second story fire-escape of one of the houses, signi-
fying that Joss or a club has a habitation there. An
American patent medicine concern has seized the oppor-
tunity to decorate the back-ground with its cabalistic
trade-mark, that in this company looks as foreign as the
rest. Doubtless the privilege was bought for cash. It
will buy anything in Chinatown, Joss himself included, as
indeed, why should it not ? He was bought for cash
across the sea and came here under the law that shuts out
the live Chinaman, but lets in his dead god on payment of
the statutory duty on bric-a-brac. Red and yellow are the
holiday colors of Chinatown as of the Bend, but they do
not lend brightness in Mott Street as around the corner in
Mulberry. Rather, they seem to descend to the level of
the general dulness, and glower at you from doors and

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

windows, from the telegraph pole that is the official organ
of Chinatown and from the store signs, with blank, un-
meaning stare, suggesting nothing, asking no questions,
and answering none. Fifth Avenue is not duller on a
rainy day than Mott Street to one in search of excite-
ment. "Whatever is on foot goes on behind closed doors.
Stealth and secretiveness are as much part of the China-
man in New York as the cat-like tread of his felt shoes.
His business, as his domestic life, shuns the light, less be-
cause there is anything to conceal than because that is the
way of the man. Perhaps the attitude of American civili-
zation toward the stranger, whom it invited in, has taught
him that way. At any rate, the very doorways of his
offices and shops are fenced off by queer, forbidding
partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege. The
stranger who enters through the crooked approach is re-
ceived with sudden silence, a sullen stare, and an angry
" Yat you vant ? " that breathes annoyance and distrust.

Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in
Chinatown as out of it. Were not Mott Street overawed
in its isolation, it would not be safe to descend this open
cellar- way, through which come the pungent odor of burn-
ing opium and the clink of copper coins on the table. As
it is, though safe, it is not profitable to intrude. At the
first foot-fall of leather soles on the steps the hum of talk
ceases, and the group of celestials, crouching over their
game of fan tan, stop playing and watch the comer with
ugly looks. Fan tan is their ruling passion. The aver-
age Chinama.], the police will tell you, would rather gam-
ble than eat any day, and they have ample experience to
back them. Only the fellow in the bunk smokes away,
indifferent to all else but his pipe and his own enjoyment.
It is a mistake to assume that Chinatown is honeycombed

CHIXATOWX.

with opium " joints." There are a good many more out-
side of it than in it. The celestials do not monopolize
the pipe. In Mott Street there is no need of them. Xot
a Chinese home or burrow there, but has its bunk and its
lay-out, where they can be enjoyed safe from police inter-
ference. The Chinaman smokes opium as Caucasians
smoke tobacco, and apparently with little worse effect
upon himself. But woe unto the white victim upon which
his pitiless drug gets its grip !

The bloused pedlars who, with arms buried half to the
elbow in their trousers' pockets, lounge behind their stock
of watermelon seed and sugar-cane, cut in lengths to suit
the purse of the buyer, disdain to offer the barbarian their
wares. Chinatown, that does most things by contraries,
rules it holiday style to carry its hands in its pockets, and
its denizens follow the fashion, whether in blue blouse, in
gray, or in brown, with shining and braided pig-tail dang-
ling below the knees, or with hair cropped short above a
coat collar of " Melican " cut. All kinds of men are met,
but no women— none at least with almond eyes. The
reason is simple : there are none. A few, a very few,
Chinese merchants have wives of their own color, but
they are seldom or never seen in the street. The " wives "
of Chinatown are of a different stock that comes closer
home.

From the teeming tenements to the right and left of it
come the white slaves of its dens of vice and their infernal
drug, that have infused into the " Bloody Sixth" Ward
a subtler poison than ever the stale-beer dives knew, or
the " sudden death " of the Old Brewery. There are
houses, dozens of them, in Mott and Pell Streets, that are
literally jammed, from the "joint" in the cellar to the
attic, with these hapless victims of a passion which, once

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

acquired, demands the sacrifice of every instinct of decen-
cy to its insatiate desire. There is a church in Mott Street,
at the entrance to Chinatown, that stands as a barrier be-
tween it and the tenements beyond. Its young men have
waged unceasing war upon the monstrous wickedness for
years, but with very little real result. I have in mind a
house in Pell Street that has been raided no end of times
by the police, and its population emptied upon Blackwell's
Island, or into the reformatories, yet is to-day honey-
combed with scores of the conventional households of
the Chinese quarter : the men worshippers of Joss ; the
women, all white, girls hardly yet grown to womanhood,
worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them
body and soul. Easily tempted from homes that have no
claim upon the name, they rarely or never return. Mott
Street gives up its victims only to the Charity Hospital or
the Potter's Field. Of the depth of their fall no one is
more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves ; no
one less concerned about it. The calmness with which
they discuss it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction
of a marriage that deceives no one, is disheartening.
Their misery is peculiarly fond of company, and an
amount of visiting goes on in these households that makes
it extremely difficult for the stranger to untangle them.
I came across a company of them " hitting the pipe " to-
gether, on a tour through their dens one night with the
police captain of the precinct. The girls knew him, called
him by name, offered him a pipe, and chatted with him
about the incidents of their acquaintance, how many times
he had " sent them up," and their chances of " lasting "
much longer. There was no shade of regret in their
voices, nothing but utter indifference and surrender.
One thing about them wras conspicuous : their scrupu-

CHIXATOWN.

lous neatness. It is the distinguishing mark cf China-
town, outwardly and physically. It is not altogether by
chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as his dis-
tinctive field. He is by nature as clean as the cat, which
he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning, and savage
fury when aroused. On this point of cleanliness he in-
sists in his domestic circle, yielding in others with crafty
submissiveness to the caprice of the girls, who " boss " him
in a very independent manner, fretting vengefully under
the yoke they loathe, but which they know right well they
can never shake off, once they have put the pipe to their
lips and given Mott Street a mortgage upon their souls
for all time. To the priest, whom they call in when the
poison racks the body, they pretend that they are yet their
own masters ; but he knows that it is an idle boast, least
of all believed by themselves. As he walks with them
the few short steps to the Potter's Field, he hears the sad
story he has heard told over and over again, of father,
mother, home, and friends given up for the accursed pipe,
and stands hopeless and helpless before the colossal evil
for which he knows no remedy.

The frequent assertions of the authorities that at least
no girls under age are wrecked on this Chinese shoal, are
disproved by the observation of those who go frequently
among these dens, though the smallest girl will invariably,
and usually without being asked, insist that she is sixteen,
and so of age to choose the company she keeps. Such as-
sertions are not to be taken seriously. Even while I am
writing, the morning returns from one of the precincts
that pass through my hands report the arrest of a China-
man for " inveigling little girls into his laundry," one of
the hundred outposts of Chinatown that are scattered all
over the city, as the outer threads of the spider's web that
7

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

holds its prey fast. Reference to case No. 39,499 in this
year's report of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children, will discover one of the much travelled roads
to Chinatown. The girl whose story it tells was thirteen,
and one of six children abandoned by a dissipated father.
She had been discharged from an Eighth Avenue store,
where she was employed as cash girl, and, being afraid to
tell her mother, floated about until she landed in a Chin-
ese laundry. The judge heeded her tearful prayer, and

IN A CHINESE JOINT.

sent her home with her mother, but she was back again in
a little while despite all promises of reform.

Her tyrant knows well that she will come, and patiently
bides his time. When her struggles in the web have
ceased at last, he rules no longer with gloved hand. A
specimen of celestial logic from the home circle at this
period came home to me with a personal application, one
evening when I attempted, with a policeman, to stop a
Chinaman whom we found beating his white " wife "
with a broom-handle in a Mott Street cellar. He was

CHINATOWN,

angry at our interference, and declared vehemently that
she was " bad."

" S'ppose your wifee bad, you no lickee her ? " he asked,
as if there could be no appeal from such a common-
sense proposition as that. My assurance that I did not,
that such a thing could not occur to me, struck him dumb
with amazement. He eyed me a while in stupid silence,
poked the linen in his tub, stole another look, and made
up his mind. A gleam of intelligence shone in his eye,
and pity and contempt struggled in his voice. " Then, I
guess, she lickee you," he said.

No small commotion was caused in Chinatown once
upon the occasion of an expedition I undertook, accom-
panied by a couple of police detectives, to photograph
Joss. Some conscienceless wag spread the report, after
we were gone, that his picture was wanted for the Rogues'
Gallery at Headquarters. The insult was too gross to be
passed over without atonement of some sort. Two roast
pigs made matters all right with his offended majesty of
Mott Street, and with his attendant priests, who bear a
very practical hand in the worship by serving as the
divine stomach, as it were. They eat the good things set
before their rice-paper master, unless, as once happened,
some sacrilegious tramp sneaks in and gets ahead of them.
The practical way in which this people combine wor-
ship with business is certainly admirable. I was told that
the scrawl covering the wall on both sides of the shrine
stood for the names of the pillars of the church or club
— the Joss House is both — that they might have their re-
ward in this world, no matter what happened to them in
the next. There was another inscription overhead that
needed no interpreter. In familiar English letters, copied
bodily from the trade dollar, was the sentiment : " In God

100

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

we trust." The priest pointed to it with undisguised
pride and attempted an explanation, from which I gath-
ered that the inscription was intended as a diplomatic
courtesy, a delicate international compliment to the "Mel-
ican Joss,*' the almighty dollar.

Chinatown has enlisted the telegraph for the dissemina-

THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF CHFSATOWN."

4 tion of public intelligence, but it has got hold of the con-
trivance by the wrong end. As the wires serve us in
newspaper-making, so the Chinaman makes use of the
pole for the same purpose. The telegraph pole, of which
I spoke as the real official organ of Chinatown, stands not
far from the Joss House in Mott Street, in full view from
Chatham Square. In it centres the real life of the col-

CHINATOWN.

101

on j, its gambling news. Every day yellow and red notices
are posted upon it by unseen hands, announcing that in
such and such a cellar a fan tan game will be running that
night, or warning the faithful that a raid is intended on
this or that game through the machination of a rival in-
terest. A constant stream of plotting and counter-plotting
makes up the round of Chinese social and political exis-
tence. I do not pretend to understand the exact political
structure of the colony, or its internal government. Even
discarding as idle the stories of a secret cabal with power
over life and death, and authority to enforce its decrees,
there is evidence enough that the Chinese consider them-
selves subject to the laws of the land only when submis-
sion is unavoidable, and that they are governed by a code
of their own, the very essence of which is rejection of all
other authority except under compulsion. If now and
then some horrible crime in the Chinese colony, a murder
of such hideous ferocity as one I have a very vivid recol-
lection of, where the murderer stabbed his victim (both
Chinamen, of course) in the back with a meat-knife,
plunging it in to the hilt no less than seventeen times,
arouses the popular prejudice to a suspicion that it was
" ordered," only the suspected themselves are to blame,
for they appear to rise up as one man to shield the crim-
inal. The difficulty of tracing the motive of the crime
and the murderer is extreme, and it is the rarest of all re-
sults that the police get on the track of either. The
obstacles in the way of hunting down an Italian murderer
are as nothing to the opposition encountered in China-
town. Xor is the failure of the pursuit wholly to be
ascribed to the familiar fact that to Caucasian eyes " all
Chinamen look alike," but rather to their acting " alike,"
in a body, to defeat discovery at any cost.

102

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Withal the police give the Chinese the name of being
the " quietest people down there," meaning in the notori-
ously turbulent Sixth Ward ; and they are. The one
thing they desire above all is to be let alone, a very nat-
ural wish perhaps, considering all the circumstances. If
it were a laudable, or even an allowable ambition that
prompts it, they might be humored with advantage, prob-
ably, to both sides. But the facts show too plainly that
it is not, and that in their very exclusiveness and reserve
they are a constant and terrible menace to society, wholly
regardless of their influence upon the industrial problems
which their presence confuses. The severest official scru-
tiny, the harshest repressive measures are justifiable in
Chinatown, orderly as it appears on the surface, even more
than in the Bend, and the case is infinitely more urgent.
To the peril that threatens there all the senses are alert,
whereas the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts
mind and body to sleep, to work out its deadly purpose in
the corruption of the soul.

This again may be set down as a harsh judgment. I
may be accused of inciting persecution of an unoffending
people. Far from it. Granted, that the Chinese are in
no sense a desirable element of the population, that they
serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have
done elsewhere in other days, yet to this it is a sufficient
answer that they are here, and that, having let them in, we
must make the best of it. This is a time for very plain
speaking on this subject. .Rather than banish the China-
man, I would have the door opened wider — for his wife ;
make it a condition of his coming or staying that he bring
his wife with him. Then, at least, he might not be what
he now is and remains, a homeless stranger among us.
Upon this hinges the real Chinese question, in our city at

CHINATOWN".

103

all events, as I see it. To assert that the victims of his
drug and his base passions would go to the bad anyhow, is
begging the question. They might and they might not.
The chance is the span between life and death. From
any other form of dissipation than that for which China-
town stands there is recovery; for the victims of any other
vice, hope. For these there is neither hope nor recovery ;
nothing but death — moral, mental, and physical death.

CHAPTEK X.

JEWTOWN.

THE tenements grow taller, and the gaps in tlieir ranks
close up rapidly as we cross the Bowery and, leaving
Chinatown and the Italians behind, invade the Hebrew
quarter. Baxter Street, with its interminable rows of old
clothes shops and its brigades of pullers-in — nicknamed
" the Bay " in honor, perhaps, of the tars who lay to there
after a cruise to stock up their togs, or maybe after the
"schooners" of beer plentifully bespoke in that latitude —
Bayard Street, with its synagogues and its crowds, gave us
a foretaste of it. No need of asking here where we are.
The jargon of the street, the signs of the sidewalk, the
manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physi-
ognomy, betray tlieir race at every step. Men with queer
skull-caps venerable beard, and the outlandish long-skirt-
ed kaftan of the Russian Jew, elbow the ugliest and the
handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling.
The old women are hags ; the young, houris. AVives
and mothers at sixteen, at thirty they are old. So thor-
oughly has the chosen people crowded out the Gentiles in
the Tenth TVard that, when the great Jewish holidays
come around every year, the public schools in the district
have practically to close up. Of their thousands of pupils
scarce a handful come to school. Nor is there any suspi-
cion that the rest are playing hookey. They stay honestly

JEWTOTOf.

105

home to celebrate. There is no mistaking it : we are in
Jewtown.

It is said that nowhere in the world are so many peo-
ple crowded together on a square mile as here. The av-
erage five-story tenement adds a story or two to its stature
in Ludlow Street and an extra building on the rear lot,
and yet the sign " To Let " is the rarest of all there. Here
is one seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose
beat this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families,
but the term has a widely different meaning here and on
the avenues. In this house, where a case of small -pox
was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-
eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex
Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made
to hold a " family" of father and mother, twelve children,
and six boarders. The boarder plays as important a part
in the domestic economy of Jewtown as the lodger in the
Mulberry Street Bend. These are samples of the packing
of the population that has run up the record here to the
rate of three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile.
The densest crowding of Old London, I pointed out before,
never got beyond a hundred and seventy-five thousand.
Even the alley is crowded out. Through dark hallways
and filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot of the street,
with dirty children, the settlements in the rear are
reached. Thieves know how to find them when pursued
by the police, and the tramps that sneak in on chilly
nights to fight for the warm spot in the yard over some
baker's oven. They are out of place in this hive of busy
industry, and they know it. It has nothing in common
with them or with their philosophy of life, that the world
owes the idler a living. Life here means the hardest kind
of work almost from the cradle. The world as a debtor

106

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

lias no credit in Jewtown. Its promise to pay wouldn't
buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester
Street, unless backed by security representing labor done
at lowest market rates. But this army of workers must
have bread. It is cheap and filling, and bakeries abound.
Wherever they are in the tenements the tramp will skulk
in, if he can. There is such a tramps' roost in the rear of
a tenement near the lower end of Ludlow Street, that is
never without its tenants in winter. By a judicious prac-

A TRAMP'S NEST IN LUDLOW STREET.

tice of flopping over on the stone pavement at intervals,
and thus warming one side at a time, and with an empty
box to put the feet in, it is possible to keep. reasonably
comfortable there even on a rainy night. In summer the
yard is the only one in the neighborhood that does not
do duty as a public dormitory.

Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the
world over. It is at once its strength and its fatal weak-
ness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become an
over-mastering passion with these people who come here

JEWTOWX.

107

in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution, from
which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has
enslaved them in bondage worse than that from which
they fled. Money is their God. Life itself is of little
value compared with even the leanest bank account. In
no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and materi-
alistic an aspect as in Ludlow Street. Over and over again
I have met with instances of these Polish or Russian Jews
deliberately starving themselves to the point of physical
exhaustion, while working night and day at a tremendous
pressure to save a little money. An avenging Xemesis
pursues this headlong hunt for wealth ; there is no worse
paid class anywhere. I once put the question to one of
their own people, who, being a pawnbroker, and an unu-
sually intelligent and charitable one, certainly enjoyed the
advantage of a practical view of the situation : " Whence
the many wretchedly poor people in such a colony of
workers, where poverty, from a misfortune, has become
a reproach, dreaded as the plague ? "

" Immigration/' he said, " brings us a lot. In five
years it has averaged twenty-five thousand a year, of
which more that seventy per cent, have stayed in Xew
York. Half of them require and receive aid from the
Hebrew Charities from the very start, lest they starve.
That is one explanation. There is another class than the
one that cannot get work : those who have had too much
of it ; who have worked and hoarded and lived, crowded
together like pigs, on the scantiest fare and the worst to
be got, bound to save whatever their earnings, until, worn
out, they could work no longer. Then their hoards were
soon exhausted. That is their story." And I knew that
what he said was true.

Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and

108

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

disease, and Jewtown is no exception. It could not well
be otherwise in such crowds, considering especially their
low intellectual status. The managers of the Eastern
Dispensary, which is in the very heart of their district,
told the whole story when they said : " The diseases these
people suffer from are not due to intemperance or immo-
rality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food, and the
foul air in which they live and work." * The homes of
the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. Reference
will be made to the economic conditions under which they
work in a succeeding chapter. Here we are concerned
simply with the fact. You are made fully aware of it be-
fore you have travelled the length of a single block in
any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a thousand
sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest
dawn till mind and muscle give out together. Every
member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest,
bears a hand, shut in the qualmy rooms, where meals are
cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, the live-
long day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons — men,
women, and children — at work in a single small room. The
fact accounts for the contrast that strikes with wonder the
observer who comes across from the Bend. Over there
the entire population seems possessed of an uncontrolla-
ble impulse to get out into the street ; here all its ener-
gies appear to be bent upon keeping in and away from it.
Xot that the streets are deserted. The overflow from
these tenements is enough to make a crowd anywhere.
The children alone would do it. Xot old enough to work
and no room for play, that is their story. In the home
the child's place is usurped by the lodger, who performs
the service of the Irishman's pig — pays the rent. In the
* Report of Eastern Dispensary for 1889.

JEWTOTHST.

109

street the army of hucksters crowd him out. Typhus
fever and small-pox are bred here, and help solve the
question what to do with him. Filth diseases both, they
sprout naturally among the hordes that bring the germs
with them from across the sea, and whose first instinct is
to hide their sick lest the authorities carry them off to the
hospital to be slaughtered, as they firmly believe. The
health officers are on constant and sharp lookout for hid-
den fever-nests. Considering that half of the ready-made
clothes that are sold in the big stores, if not a good deal
more than half, are made in these tenement rooms, this is
not excessive caution. It has happened more than once
that a child recovering from small-pox, and in the most
contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling
among heaps of half-finished clothing that the next day
would be offered for sale on the counter of a Broadway
store ; or that a typhus fever patient has been discovered
in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been sent
home that week, each one with the wearer's death-war-
rant, unseen and unsuspected, basted in the lining.

The health officers call the Tenth the typhus ward ; in
the office where deaths are registered it passes as the
"suicide ward," for reasons not hard to understand; and
among the police as the " crooked ward," on account of
the number of " crooks," petty thieves and their allies, the
" fences," receivers of stolen goods, who find the dense
crowds congenial. The nearness of the Bowery, the great
" thieves' highway," helps to keep up the supply of these,
but Jewtown does not support its dives. Its troubles
with the police are the characteristic crop of its intense
business rivalries. Oppression, persecution, have not
shorn the Jew of his native combativeness one whit. He
is as ready to fight for his rights, or what he considers his

110

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

rights, in a business transaction — synonymous generally
with his advantage — as if he had not been robbed of them
for eighteen hundred years. One strong impression sur-
vives with him from his days of bondage : the power of
the law. On the slightest provocation he rushes off to in-
voke it for his protection. Doubtless the sensation is
novel to him, and therefore pleasing. The police at the
Eldridge Street station are in a constant turmoil over
these everlasting fights. Somebody is always denouncing
somebody else, and getting his enemy or himself locked
up ; frequently both, for the prisoner, when brought in,
has generally as plausible a story to tell as his accuser, and
as hot a charge to make. The day closes on a wild con-
flict of rival interests. Another dawns with the prisoner
in court, but no complainant. Over night the case has
been settled on a business basis, and the police dismiss
their prisoner in deep disgust.

These quarrels have sometimes a comic aspect. Thus,
with the numerous dancing-schools that are scattered
among the synagogues, often keeping them company in
the same tenement. They are generally kept by some
man who works in the daytime at tailoring, cigarmaking,
or something else. The young people in Jewtown are
inordinately fond of dancing, and after their day's hard
work will flock to these " schools " for a night's recrea-
tion. But even to their fun they carry their business pre-
ferences, and it happens that a school adjourns in a body
to make a general raid on the rival establishment across
the street, w;thout the ceremony of paying the admission
fee. Then the dance breaks up in a general fight, in
which, likely enough, someone is badly hurt. The police
come in, as usual, and ring down the curtain.

Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his reli-

112

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

gious life is invaded that a real inside view is obtained of
this Jew, whom the history of Christian civilization has
taught nothing but fear and hatred. There are two or
three missions in the district conducting a hopeless prop-
agandism for the Messiah whom the Tenth Ward re-
jects, and they attract occasional crowds, who come to
hear the Christian preacher as the Jews of old gathered
to hear the apostles expound the new doctrine. The re-
sult is often strikingly similar. "For once," said a certain
well-known minister of an uptown church to me, after
such an experience, "I felt justified in comparing myself
to Paul preaching salvation to the Jews. They kept still
until I spoke of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Then
they got up and fell to arguing among themselves and to
threatening me, until it looked as if they meant to take
me out in Hester Street and stone me." As at Jerusalem,
the Chief Captain was happily at hand with his centuvions,
in the person of a sergeant and three policemen, and the
preacher was rescued. So, in all matters pertaining to
their religious life that tinges all their customs, they stand,
these East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on
Calvary left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the
light. A visit to a Jewish house of mourning is like
bridging the gap of two thousand years. The inexpress-
ibly sad and sorrowful wail for the dead, as it swells and
rises in the hush of all sounds of life, comes back from the
ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel " weeping
for her children and refusing to be comforted, because
they are not."

Attached to many of the synagogues, which among the
poorest Jews frequently consist of a scantily furnished
room in a rear tenement, with a few wooden stools or
benches for the congregation, are Talmudic schools that

JEWTOWN.

113

absorb a share of the growing youth. The school-master
is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been
stranded there, his native instinct for money-making hav-
ing been smothered in the process that has made of him a
learned man. It was of such a school in Eldridge Street
that the wicked Isaac Iacob, who killed his enemy, his
wife, and himself in one day," was janitor. But the
majority of the children seek the public schools, where
they are received sometimes with some misgivings on the
part of the teachers, who find it necessary to inculcate
lessons of cleanliness in the worst cases by practical dem-
onstration with wash-bowl and soap. " He took hold
of the soap as if it were some animal," said one of these
teachers to me after such an experiment upon a new
pupil, " and wiped three fingers across his face. He
called that washing." In the Allen Street public school
the experienced principal has embodied among the ele-
mentary lessons, to keep constantly before the children
the duty that clearly lies next to their hands, a character-
istic exercise. The question is asked daily from the
teacher's desk : " What must I do to be healthy ? " and
the whole school responds :

" I must keep my skin clean,
Wear clean clothes,
Breathe pure air,
And live in the sunlight."

It seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear them say
it, for to not a few of them all these things are known
only by name. In their everyday life there is nothing
even to suggest any of them. Only the demand of reli-
gious custom has power to make their parents clean up at
stated intervals, and the young naturally are no better.
8

114

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

As scholars, the children of the most ignorant Polish
Jew keep fairly abreast of their more favored playmates,
until it comes to mental arithmetic, when they leave
them behind with a bound. It is surprising to see how
strong the instinct of dollars and cents is in them.
They can count, and correctly, almost before they can
talk.

Within a few years the police captured on the East Side
a band of firebugs who made a business of setting fire to
tenements for the insurance on their furniture. There has,
unfortunately, been some evidence in the past year that
another such conspiracy is on foot. The danger to which
these fiends expose their fellow- tenants is appalling. A
fire-panic at night in a tenement, by no means among
the rare experiences in New York, with the surging, half-
smothered crowds on stairs and fire-escapes, the frantic
mothers and crying children, the wild struggle to oave the
little that is their all, is a horror that has few parallels in
human experience.

I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a
First Avenue tenement. It was in the middle of the night.
The fire had swept up with sudden fury from a restaurant
on the street floor, cutting off escape. Men and women
threw themselves from the windows, or were carried down
senseless by the firemen. Thirteen half-clad, apparently
lifeless bodies were laid on the floor of an adjoining coal-
office, and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with
sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A half -grown girl with
a baby in her arms walked about among the dead and
dying with a stunned, vacant look, singing in a low, scared
voice to the child. One of the doctors took her arm to
lead her out, and patted the cheek of the baby soothingly.
It was cold. The baby had been smothered with its

JEWTOVTX.

115

father and mother ; but the girl, her sister, did not know
it. Her reason had fled.

Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days
in the " Pig-market." Then is the time to study the ways
of this peculiar people to the best advantage. A common
pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish Jews and in the
Mulberry Bend, though they have little else in common.
Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual holiday,
here a veritable tread-mill of industry. Friday brings out
all the latent color and picturesqueness of the Italians, as
of these Semites. The crowds and the common poverty
are the bonds of sympathy between them. The Pig-mar-
ket is in Hester Street, extending either way from Lud-
low Street, and up and down the side streets two or three
blocks, as the state of trade demands. The name was
given to it probably in derision, for pork is the one ware
that is not on sale in the Pig-market. There is scarcely
anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is
not to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandan-
nas and tin cups at two cents, peaches at a cent a quart,
" damaged " eggs for a song, hats for a quarter, and spec-
tacles, warranted to suit the eye, at the optician's who has
opened shop on a Hester Street door-step, for thirty five
cents ; frowsy-looking chickens and half-plucked geese,
hung by the neck and protesting with wildly strutting
feet even in death against the outrage, are the great staple
of the market. Half or a quarter of a chicken can be
bought here by those who cannot afford a whole. It took
more than ten years of persistent effort on the part of the
sanitary authorities to drive the trade in live fowl from
the streets to the fowl-market on Gouverneur Slip, where
the killing is now done according to Jewish rite by priests
detailed for the purpose by the chief rabbi. Since then

116

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

they have had a characteristic rumpus, that involved the
entire Jewish community, over the fees for killing and the
mode of collecting them. Here is a woman churning
horse-radish on a machine she has chained and padlocked
to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone steal it. Beside
her a butcher's stand with cuts at prices the avenues never
dreamed of. Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, " as
good as new," and "pants" — there are no trousers in
Jewtown, only pants — at anything that can be got.
There is a knot of half a dozen " pants " pedlars in the
middle of the street, twice as many men of their own
race fingering their wares and plucking at the seams
with the anxious scrutiny of would-be buyers, though
none of them has the least idea of investing in a pair.
Yes, stop ! This baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed
and with bare arms, has made an offer : for this pair thirty
cents ; a dollar and forty was the price asked. The ped-
lar shrugs his shoulders, and turns up his hands with a
half pitying, wholly indignant air. What does the baker
take him for ? Such pants — . The baker has turned to
go. With a jump like a panther's, the man with the
pants has him by the sleeve. Will he give eighty cents ?
Sixty ? ftftj ? So help him, they are dirt cheap at that.
Lose, will he, on the trade, lose all the profit of his day's
pedling. The baker goes on unmoved. Forty then ?
What, not forty ? Take them then for thirty, and wreck
the life of a poor man. And the baker takes them and
goes, well knowing that at least twenty cents of the thirty,
two hundred per cent., were clear profit, if indeed the
" pants " cost the pedlar anything

The suspender pedlar is the mystery of the Pig-market,
omnipresent and unfathomable. He is met at every step
with his wares dangling over his shoulder, down his back,

118

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

and in front. Millions of suspenders thus perambulate
Jewtown all day on a sort of dress parade. Why suspen-
ders, is the puzzle, and where do they all go to ? The
" pants " of Jewtown hang down with a common accord,
as if they had never known the support of suspenders. It
appears to be as characteristic a trait of the race as the
long beard and the Sabbath silk hat of ancient pedigree.
1 have asked again and again. No one has ever been able
to tell me what becomes of the suspenders of Jewtown.
Perhaps they are hung up as bric-a-brac in its homes, or
laid away and saved up as the equivalent of cash. I can-
not tell. I only know that more suspenders are hawked
about the Pig-market every day than would supply the
whole of New York for a year, were they all bought and
turned to use.

The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and
about the sidewalk shops, where a gutter plank cn two
ash-barrels does duty for a counter ! Pushing, struggling,
babbling, and shouting in foreign tongues, a veritable
Babel of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear
almost with a sense of shock, as something unexpected
and strange. In the midst of it all there is a sudden wild
scattering, a hustling of things from the street into dark
cellars, into back-yards and by-ways, a slamming and
locking of doors hidden under the improvised shelves and
counters. The health officers' cart is coming down the
street, preceded and followed by stalwart policemen, who
shovel up with scant ceremony the eatables — musty bread,
decayed fish i*nd stale vegetables — indifferent to the curses
that are showered on them from stoops and windows, and
carry them off to the dump. In the wake of the wagon,
as it makes its way to the East River after the raid, fol-
low a line of despoiled hucksters shouting defiance from a

JEWTOW2*.

119

safe distance. Their clamor dies away with the noise of
the market. The endless panorama of the tenements,
rows upon rows, between stony streets, stretches to the
north, to the south, and to the west as far as the eye
reaches.

CHAPTER XL

THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN.

ANYTHING like an exhaustive discussion of the eco*
nomical problem presented by the Tenth Ward *
is beset by difficulties that increase in precise proportion
to the efforts put forth to remove them, I have too vivid
a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those
stewing tenements, trying to get to the bottom of the vex-
atious question only to find myself in the end as far from
the truth as at the beginning, asking with rising wrath
PilaWs question, " What is truth ? " to attempt to weary
the reader by dragging him with me over that sterile and
unprofitable ground. 'Nov are these pages the place for
such a discussion. In it, let me confess it at once and
have done with it, I should be like the blind leading the
blind ; between the real and apparent poverty, the hidden
hoards and the unhesitating mendacity of these people,
where they conceive their interests to be concerned in one
way or another, the reader and I would fall together into
the ditch of doubt and conjecture in which I have found
company before.

The facts that lie on the surface indicate the causes as
clearly as the nature of the trouble. In effect both have

* I refer to the Tenth Ward always as typical. The district embraced
in the discussion really includes the Thirteenth Ward, and in a growing
sense large portions of the Seventh and contiguous wards as well.

THE SWEATEES OF JEWTOWN.

121

been already stated. A friend of mine who manufactures
cloth once boasted to me that nowadays, on cheap cloth-
ing, New York " beats the world." " To what," I asked,
" do you attribute it ? " " To the cutter's long knife * and
the Polish Jew," he said. Which of the two has cut
deepest into the workman's wages is not a doubtful ques-
tion. Practically the Jew has monopolized the business
since the battle between East Broadway and Broadway
ended in a complete victory for the East Side and cheap
labor, and transferred to it the control of the trade in
cheap clothing. Yet, not satisfied with having won the
field, he strives as hotly with his own for the profit of
half a cent as he fought with his Christian competitor
for the dollar. If the victory is a barren one, the blame
is his own. His price is not what he can get, but the
lowest he can live for and underbid his neighbor. Just
what that means we shall see. The manufacturer knows
it, and is not slow to take advantage of his knowledge.
He makes him hungry for work by keeping it from him
as long as possible ; then drives the closest bargain he can
with the sweater.

Many harsh things have been said of the " sweater,"
that really apply to the system in which he is a necessary,
logical link. It can at least be said of him that he is no
worse than the conditions that created him. The sweater
is simply the middleman, the sub-contractor, a workman
like his fellows, perhaps with the single distinction from
the rest that he knows a little English ; perhaps not even
that, but with the accidental possession of two or three
sewing-machines, or of credit enough to hire them, as his
capital, who drums up work among the clothing-houses.

* An invention that cuts many garments at once, where the scissors
could cut only a few.

122

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Of workmen lie can always get enough. Every ship-load
from German ports brings them to his door in droves,
clamoring for work. The sun sets upon the day of the
arrival of many a Polish Jew, finding him at work in an
East Side tenement, treading the machine and " learning
the trade." Often there are two, sometimes three, sets of
sweaters on one job. They work with the rest when they
are not drumming up trade, driving their " hands " as they
drive their machine, for all they are worth, and making a
profit on their work, of course, though in most cases not
nearly as extravagant a percentage, probably, as is often
supposed. If it resolves itself into a margin of five or six
cents, or even less, on a dozen pairs of boys' trousers, for
instance, it is nevertheless enough to make the contractor
with his thrifty instincts independent. The workman
growls, not at the hard labor, or poor pay, but over the
pennies another is coining out of his sweat, and on the
first opportunity turns sweater himself, and takes his re-
venge by driving an even closer bargain than his rival
tyrant, thus reducing his profits.

The sweater knows well that the isolation of the work-
man in his helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and
he has done, what he could — with merciless severity where
he could — to smother every symptom of awakening intel-
ligence in his slaves. In this effort to perpetuate his des-
potism he has had the effectual assistance of his own
system and the sharp competition that keep the men on
starvation wages ; of their constitutional greed, that will
not permit thn sacrifice of temporary advantage, however
slight, for permanent good, and above all, of the hungry
hordes of immigrants to whom no argument appeals save
the cry for bread. Within very recent times he has, how-
ever, been forced to partial surrender by the organization

THE SWEATEES OE JEWTOWK

123

of the men to a considerable extent into trades unions, and
by experiments in co-operation, under intelligent lead-
ership, that presage the sweater's doom. But as long
as the ignorant crowds continue to come and to herd in
these tenements, his grip can never be shaken off. And
the supply across the seas is apparently inexhaustible.
Every fresh persecution of the Russian or Polish Jew on
his native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to con-
found economical problems, and recruit the sweater's pha-
lanx. The curse of bigotry and ignorance reaches half-
way across the world, to sow its bitter seed in fertile soil
in the East Side tenements. If the Jew himself was to
blame for the resentment he aroused over there, he is
amply punished. He gathers the first-fruits of the har-
vest here.

The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements,
which the law that regulates factory labor does not reach.
To the factories themselves that are taking the place of the
rear tenements in rapidly growing numbers, letting in
bigger day-ci owds than those the health officers banished,
the tenement shops serve as a supplement through which
the law is successfully evaded. Ten hours is the legal
work-day in the factories, and nine o'clock the closing
hour at the latest. Forty-five minutes at least must be
allowed for dinner, and children under sixteen must not
be employed unless they can read and write English ; none
at all under fourteen. The very fact that such a law
should stand on the statute book, shows how desperate the
plight of these people. But the tenement has defeated
its benevolent purpose. In it the child works unchallenged
from the day he is old enough to pull a thread. There is
no such thing as a dinner hour; men and women eat while
they work, and the " day " is lengthened at both ends far

124 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

into the night. Factory hands take their work with them
at the close of the lawful day to eke out their scanty earn-
ings by working overtime at home. Little chance on this
ground for the campaign of education that alone can bring
the needed relief ; small wonder that there are whole
settlements on this East Side where English is practically
an unknown tongue, though the people be both willing and
anxious to learn. " When shall we find time to learn ? "
asked one of them of me once. I owe him the answer yet.

Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham
Square and ride up half a mile through the sweaters' dis-
trict. Every open window of the big tenements, that
stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of the
way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train
speeds by. Men and women bending over their machines,
or ironing clothes at the window, half-naked. Proprieties
do not count on the East Side ; nothing counts that can-
not be converted into hard cash. The road is like a big
gangway through an endless work-room where vast multi-
tudes are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it
makes no difference ; the scene is always the same. At
Eivington Street let us get off and continue our trip on
foot. It is Sunday evening west of the Bowery. Here,
under the rule of Mosaic law, the week of work is under
full headway, its first day far spent. The hucksters'
wagons are absent or stand idle at the curb ; the saloons
admit the thirsty crowds through the side-door labelled
" Family Entrance ; " a tin sign in a store-window an-
nounces that ? " Sunday School " gathers in stray children
of the new dispensation ; but beyond these things there
is little to suggest the Christian Sabbath. Men stagger
along the sidewalk groaning under heavy burdens of un-
sewn garments, or enormous black bags stuffed full of

THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN.

125

finished coats and trousers. Let us follow one to his
home and see how Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street
tenement.

Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new
smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every land-
ing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betray-
ing what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit
the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way.
Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and
a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in say-
ing it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers, "knee-
pants " in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered
ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on
a couch of many dozens of "pants" ready for the fin-
isher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A
fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on
the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of
everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth
on which they are working. The boy and the woman
alone look up at our entrance. The girls shoot sidelong
glances, but at a warning look from the man with the
bundle they tread their machines more energetically than
ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the
presence of a stranger.

They are " learners," all of them, says the woman, who
proves to be the wife of the boss, and have " come over"
only a few weeks ago. She is disinclined to talk at first,
but a few words in her own tongue from our guide * set her
fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows almost

* I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by one of their
own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission. Without
that precaution my errand would have been fruitless ; even with him it
was often nearly so.

126 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

talkative. The learners work for week's wages, she says.
How much do they earn ? She shrugs her shoulders with
an expressive gesture. The workers themselves, asked in
their own tongue, say indifferently, as though the question
were of no interest : from two to five dollars. The children
— there are four of them — are not old enough to work. The
oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty
dozen " knee-pants " a week, for which the manufacturer
pays seventy cents a dozen. Five cents a dozen is the
clear profit, but her own and her husband's work brings
the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a week, when
they have work all the time. But often half the time is
put in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine
o'clock at night, from daybreak. There are ten machines
in the room ; six are hired at two dollars a month. For
the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one somewhat
larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month.
She does not complain, though " times are not what they
were, and it costs a good deal to live." Eight dollars a
week for the family of six and two boarders. How do
they do it ? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of fare,
at the silly question : Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk
two quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat
for dinner at twelve cents, butter one pound a week at
" eight cents a quarter of a pound." Coffee, potatoes, and
pickles complete the list. At the least calculation, prob-
ably, this sweater's family hoards up thirty dollars a month,
and in a few ye'ars will own a tenement somewhere and
profit by the example set by their landlord in rent-col-
lecting. It is the way the savings of Jewtown are uni-
versally invested, and with the natural talent of its people
for commercial speculation the investment is enormously
profitable.

128

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

On the next floor, in a dimly lighted room with a big
red-hot stove to keep the pressing irons ready for use, is
a family of man, wife, three children, and a boarder.
" Knee-pants " are made there too, of a still lower grade.
Three cents and a half is all he clears, says the man, and
lies probably out of at least two cents. The wife makes a
dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at
the machine. The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week,
lie is really only a lodger, getting his meals outside. The
rent is two dollars and twenty -five cents a week, cost of
living five dollars. Every floor has at least two, some-
times four, such shops. Here is one with a young family
for which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife
work together; jnst now the latter, a comely young wom-
an, is eating her dinner of dry bread and green pickles.
Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. They are filling,
and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those
who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them
and grow strong — plain proof that they are good to eat.
The rest ? " Well, they die," says our guide, dryly. "No
thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family
with life all before it. In a few years the man will
be a prosperous sweater. Already he employs an old
man as ironer at three dollars a week, and a sweet-
faced little Italian girl as finisher at a dollar and a
half. She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor
write ; will probably never learn. How should she ?
The family clears from ten to eleven dollars a week
in brisk times, more than half of which goes into the
bank.

A companion picture from across the hall. The man
works on the machine for his sweater twelve hours a clay,
turning out three dozen " knee-pants," for which he re-

THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN.

129

ceives forty-two cents a dozen. The finisher who works
with him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a dozen ;
buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred.
This operator has four children at his home in Stanton
Street, none old enough to work, and a sick wife. His
rent is twelve dollars a month ; his wages for a hard
week's work less than eight dollars. Such as he, with
their consuming desire for money thus smothered, re-
cruit the ranks of the anarchists, won over by the prom-
ise of a general " divide ; " and an enlightened public
sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious foreigner for
whose perverted notions there is no room in this land of
plenty.

Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble upon
a nest of cloak-makers in their busy season. Six months
of the year the cloak-maker is idle, or nearly so. Now is
his harvest. Seventy-five cents a cloak, all complete, is
the price in this shop. The cloak is of cheap plush, and
might sell for eight or nine dollars over the store-counter.
Seven dollars |b the weekly wage of this man with wife
and two children, and nine dollars and a half rent to pay
per month. A boarder pays about a third of it. There
was a time when he made ten dollars a week and thought
himself rich. But wages have come down fearfully in
the last two years. Think of it : " come down " to this.
The other cloak-makers aver that they can make as much
as twelve dollars a week, when they are employed, by
taking their work home and sewing till midnight. One
exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street sweater.
It shows that he and his partner, working on first-class gar-
ments for a Broadway house in the four busiest weeks of
the season, made together from $15.15 to $19.20 a week
by striving from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., that is to say, from
9

130

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

$7.58 to $9.60 each.* The sweater on this work probably
made as much as fifty per cent, at least on their labor.
Not far away is a factory in a rear yard where the factory
inspector reports teams of tailors making men's coats at
an average of twenty-seven cents a coat, all complete ex-
cept buttons and button-holes.

Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in
Ludlow Street, owned by a well-known Jewish liquor
dealer and politician, a triple combination that bodes ill
for his tenants. As a matter of fact, the cheapest " apart-
ment," three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one of
which deserves the name, is rented for $13 a month.
Here is a reminder of the Bend, a hallway turned into a
shoemaker's shop. Two hallways side by side in ad-
joining tenements, would be sinful waste in Jewtown,
when one would do as well by knocking a hole in the wall.
But this shoemaker knows a trick the Italian's ingenuity
did not suggest. He has his " flat " as well as his shop
there. A curtain hung back of his stool in the narrow
passage half conceals his bed that fills it entirely from
wall to wall. To get into it he has to crawl over the foot-
board, and he must come out the same way. Expedients
more odd than this are born of the East Side crowding.
In one of the houses we left, the coal-bin of a family
on the fourth floor was on the roof of the adjoining tene-
ment. A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped
there while we talked with the people.

We have reached Broome Street. The hum of industry
in this six-story tenement on the corner leaves no doubt
of the aspect Sunday wears within it. One flight up, we
knock at the nearest door. The grocer, who keeps the

* The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in victory,
raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being.

THE SWEATEES OF JEWTOWN.

131

store, lives on the " stoop," the first floor in East Side
parlance. In this room a snspender-maker sleeps and
works with his family of wife and four children. For a
wonder there are no boarders. His wife and eighteen
years old daughter share in the work, but the girl's eyes
are giving out from the strain. Three months in the
year, when work is very brisk, the family makes by united
efforts as high as fourteen and fifteen dollars a week. The
other nine months it averages from three to four dollars.
The oldest boy, a young man, earns from four to six
dollars in an Orchard Street factory, when he has work.
The rent is ten dollars a month for the room and a miser-
able little coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep.
The girl makes her bed on the lounge in the front room ;
the big boys and the children sleep on the floor. Coal at
ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents a pound, one
and a half pound of butter a week at thirty-six cents, and
a quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time, are
items of their house-keeping account as given by the
daughter. JMilk at four and five cents a quart, " accord-
ing to quality." The sanitary authorities know what that
means, know how miserably inadequate is the fine of fifty
or a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by
the wretches who poison the babes of these- tenements with
the stuff that is half water, or swill. Their defence is
that the demand is for " cheap milk." Scarcely a wonder
that this suspender- maker will hardly be able to save up
the dot for his daughter, without which she stands no
chance of marrying in Jewtown, even with her face that
would be pretty had it a healthier tinge.

Up under the roof three men are making boys' jackets
at twenty cents a piece, of which the sewer takes eight,
the ironer three, the finisher five cents, and the button-

132

HOW THE OTHEE HALF LIVES.

hole-maker two and a quarter, leaving a cent and three-
quarters to pay for the drumming up, the fetching and
bringing back of the goods. They bunk together in a
room for which they pay eight dollars a month. All three
are single here, that is : their wives are on the other side
yet, waiting for them to earn enough to send for them.
Their breakfast, eaten at the work-bench, consists of a
couple of rolls at a cent a piece, and a draught of water,
milk when business has been very good, a square meal at
noon in a restaurant, and the morning meal over again at
night. This square meal, that is the evidence of a very
liberal disposition on the part of the consumer, is an affair
of more than ordinary note ; it may be justly called an
institution. I know of a couple of restaurants at the
lower end of Orchard Street that are favorite resorts for
the Polish Jews, who remember the injunction that the
ox that treadeth out the corn shall not be muzzled.
Being neighbors, they are rivals of course, and cutting
under. When I was last there one gave a dinner of soup,
meat-stew, bread, pie, pickles, and a " schooner " of beer
for thirteen cents ; the other charged fifteen cents for a
similar dinner, but with two schooners of beer and a cigar,
or a cigarette, as the extra inducement. The two cents
had won the day, however, and the thirteen-cent restaurant
did such a thriving business that it was about to spread
out into the adjoining store to accommodate the crowds of
customers. At this rate the lodger of Jewtown can " live
like a lord," as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a
day, including the price of his bed, that ranges all the
way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a week, and save
money, no matter what his earnings. He does it, too, so
long as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard
he sets up Jewtown must abide.

THE SWEATERS OE JEWTOTOT.

133

It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to
pay its extortionate rents. . At night there is scarce a
room in all the district that has not one or more of them,
some above half a score, sleeping on cots, or on the floor.
It is idle to speak of privacy in these " homes." The term
carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on
social ethics to an audience of Hottentots. The picture
is not overdrawn. In fact, in presenting the home life
of these people I have been at some pains to avoid the
extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they came
to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings.
Yet even the direst apparent poverty in Jewtown, unless
dependent on absolute lack of work, would, were the
truth known, in nine cases out of ten have a silver lining
in the shape of a margin in bank.

These are the economical conditions that enable my
manufacturing friend to boast that New York can " beat
the world " on cheap clothing. In support of his claim
he told me that a single Bowery firm last year sold fif-
teen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12 J.
With the material at fifteen cents a yard, he said, chil-
dren's suits of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for
seventy-five cents, and boys' cape overcoats at the same
price. They are the same conditions that }iave perplexed
the committee of benevolent Hebrews in charge of Baron
de Hirsch's munificent g^ft of ten thousand dollars a
month for the relief of the Jewish poor in New York.
To find proper channels through which to pour this money
so that it shall effect its purpose without pauperizing, and
without perpetuating the problem it is sought to solve, by
attracting still greater swarms, is indeed no easy task.
Colonization has not in the past been a success with these
people. The great mass of them are too gregarious to take

134

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

kindly to farming, and their strong commercial instinct
hampers the experiment. To herd them in model tene-
ments, though it relieve the physical suffering in a meas-
ure, would be to treat a symptom of the disease rather
than strike at its root, even if land could be got cheap
enough where they gather to build on a sufficiently large
scale to make the plan a success. Trade schools for man-
ual training could hardly be made to reach the adults, who
in addition would have to be supported for months while
learning. For the young this device has proved most ex-
cellent under the wise management of the United Hebrew
Charities, an organization that gathers to its work the
best thought and effort of many of our most public-spirit-
ed citizens. One, or all, of these plans may be tried,
probably will. I state but the misgivings as to the re-
sult of some of the practical minds that have busied them-
selves with the problem. Its keynote evidently is the
ignorance of the immigrants. They must be taught the
language of the country they have chosen as their home,
as the first and most necessary step. Whatever may fol-
low, that is essential, absolutely vital. That done, it may
well be that the case in its new aspect will not be nearly
so hard to deal with.

Evening has worn into night as we take up our home-
ward journey through the streets, now no longer silent.
The thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow
like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall. From every
door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a
half-hour's retc in the open air before sleep closes the eyes
weary with incessant working. Crowds of half-naked
children tumble in the street and on the sidewalk, or doze
fretfully on the stone steps. As we stop in front of a
tenement to watch one of these groups, a dirty baby in a

THE SWEATEES OF JEAVTOWX.

135

single brief garment — yet a sweet, human little baby de-
spite its dirt and tatters — tumbles off the lowest step, rolls
over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip, and
goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on
my boot.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BOHEMIANS— TENEMENT-HOUSE CIGARMAKING.

EYIL as the part is which the tenement plays in Jew-
town as the pretext for circumventing the law that
was made to benefit and relieve the tenant, we have not
far to go to find it in even a worse role. If the tenement
is here continually dragged into the eye of public con-
demnation and scorn, it is because in one way or another
it is found directly responsible for, or intimately associ-
ated with, three-fourths of the miseries of the poor. In
the Bohemian quarter it is made the vehicle for enforcing
upon a proud race a slavery as real as any that ever dis-
graced the South. Not content with simply robbing the
tenant, the owner, in the dual capacity of landlord and
employer, reduces him to virtual serfdom by making his
becoming his tenant, on such terms as he sees fit to make,
the condition of employment at wages likewise of his own
making. It does not help the case that this landlord em-
ployer, almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty
Polish race just described.

Perhaps the Bohemian quarter is hardly the proper
name to give to the colony, for though it has distinct
boundaries it \* scattered over a wide area on the East Side,
in wedge-like streaks that relieve the monotony of the
solid German population by their strong contrasts. The
two races mingle no more on this side of the Atlantic
than on the rugged slopes of the Bohemian mountains ;

THE BOHEMIANS.

137

the echoes of the thirty years' war ring in Xew York, after
two centuries and a half, with as fierce a hatred as the
gigantic combat bred among the vanquished Czechs. A
chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of
the Bohemian immigrant. Several causes operate to bring
this about : his singularly harsh and unattractive language,
which he can neither easily himself unlearn nor impart
to others, his stubborn pride of race, and a popular prej-
udice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of a
disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized
labor. I greatly mistrust that the Bohemian on our shores
is a much-abused man. To his traducer, who casts up an-
archism against him, he replies that the last census (1880)
shows his people to have the fewest criminals of all in pro-
portion to numbers. In Xew York a Bohemian criminal
is such a rarity that the case of two firebugs of several
years ago is remembered with damaging distinctness.
The accusation that he lives like the " rat " he is, cutting
down wages by his underpaid labor, he throws back in the
teeth of the trades unions with the counter-charge that
they are the first cause of his attitude to the labor ques-
tion.

A little way above Houston Street the first of his
colonies is encountered, in Fifth Street and thereabouts.
Then for a mile and a half scarce a Bohemian is to be
found, until Thirty-eighth Street is reached. Fifty-fourth
and Seventy-third Streets in their turn are the centres of
populous Bohemian settlements. The location of the
cigar factories, upon which he depends for a living, de-
termines his choice of home, though there is less choice
about it than with any other class in the community, save
perhaps the colored people. Probably more than half of
all the Bohemians in this city are cigarmakers, and it is

138

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

the herding of these in great numbers in the so-called
tenement factories, where the cheapest grade of work is
done at the lowest wages, that constitutes at once their
greatest hardship and the chief grudge of other workmen
against them. The manufacturer who owns, say, from
three or four, to a dozen or more tenements contiguous
to his shop, fills them up with these people, charging them
outrageous rents, and demanding often even a preliminary
deposit of five dollars " key money;" deals them out
tobacco by the week, and devotes the rest of his ener-
gies to the paring down of wages to within a peg or two of
the point where the tenant rebels in desperation. When
he does rebel, he is given the alternative of submission,
or eviction with entire loss of employment. His needs
determine the issue. Usually he is not in a position to
hesitate long. Unlike the Polish Jew, whose example of
untiring industry lie emulates, he has seldom much laid
up against a rainy day. He is fond of a glass of beer, and
likes to live as well as his means will permit. The shop
triumphs, and fetters more galling than ever are forged
for the tenant. In the opposite case, the newspapers have
to record the throwing upon the street of a small army of
people, with pitiful cases of destitution and family misery.

Men, women and children work together seven days in
the week in these cheerless tenements to make a living
for the family, from the break of day till far into the
night. Often the wife is the original cigarmaker from
the old home, the husband having adopted her trade here
as a matter of necessity, because, knowing no word of
English, he could get no other work. As they state the
cause of the bitter hostility of the trades unions, she was
the primary bone of contention in the day of the early
Bohemian immigration. The unions refused to admit the

THE BOHEMIANS.

139

women, and, as the support of the family depended upon
her to a large extent, such terms as were offered had to
be accepted. The manufacturer has ever since industri-
ously fanned the antagonism between the unions and his
hands, for his own advantage. The victory rests with him,
since the Court of Appeals decided that the law, passed a
few years ago, to prohibit cigarmaking in tenements was
unconstitutional, and thus put an end to the struggle.
While it lasted, all sorts of frightful stories were told of
the shocking conditions under which people lived and
worked in these tenements, from a sanitary point of view
especially, and a general impression survives to this day
that they are particularly desperate. The Board of
Health, after a careful canvass, did not find them so then.
I am satisfied from personal inspection, at a much later
day, guided in a number of instances by the union cigar-
makers themselves to the tenements which they consid-
ered the worst, that the accounts were greatly exagger-
ated. Doubtless the people are poor, in many cases very
poor ; but they are not uncleanly, rather the reverse ;
they live much better than the clothing-makers in the
Tenth Ward, and in spite of their sallow look, that may
be due to the all-pervading smell of tobacco, they do not
appear to be less healthy than other in-door workers. I
found on my tours of investigation several cases of con-
sumption, of which one at least was said by the doctor to
be due to the constant inhalation of tobacco fumes. But an
examination of the death records in the Health Depart-
ment does not support the claim that the Bohemian cigar-
makers are peculiarly prone to that disease. On the con-
trary, the Bohemian percentage of deaths from consump-
tion appears quite low. This, however, is a line of scien-
tific inquiry which I leave others to pursue, along with

140

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

the more involved problem whether the falling off in the
number of children, sometimes quite noticeable in the
Bohemian settlements, is, as has been suggested, depend-
ent upon the character of the parents' work. The sore
grievances 1 found were the miserable wages and the
enormous rents exacted for the minimum of accommoda-
tion. And surely these stand for enough of suffering.

Take a row of houses in East Tenth Street as an
instance. They contained thirty-five families of cigar-
makers, with probably not half a dozen persons in the
whole lot of them, outside of the children, who could
speak a word of English, though many had been in the
country half a lifetime. This room with two windows
giving on the street, and a rear attachment without
windows, called a bedroom by courtesy, is rented at
$12.25 a month. In the front room man and wife work
at the bench from six in the morning till nine at i>ight.
They make a team, stripping the tobacco leaves together ;
then he makes the filler, and she rolls the wrapper on and
finishes the cigar. For a thousand they receive $3.75,
and can turn out together three thousand cigars a week.
The point has been reached where the rebellion comes in,
and the workers in these tenements are just now on a
strike, demanding $5.00 and $5.50 for their work. The
manufacturer having refused, they are expecting hourly to
be served with notice to quit their homes, and the going
of a stranger among them excites their resentment, until
his errand is explained. While we are in the house, the
ultimatum of - he " boss " is received. He will give $3.75
a thousand, not another cent. Our host is a man of seem-
ing intelligence, yet he has been nine years in New York
and knows neither English nor German. Three bright
little children play about the floor.

THE BOHEMIANS.

141

His neighbor on the same floor has been here fifteen
years, but shakes his head when asked if he can speak
English. He answers in a few broken syllables when ad-
dressed in German. With §11.75 rent to pay for like ac-
commodation, he has the advantage of his oldest boy's work
besides his wife's at the bench. Three properly make a
team, and these three can turn out four thousand cigars a
week, at $3.75. This Bohemian has a large family ; there
are four children, too small to work, to be cared for. A
comparison of the domestic bill of fare between Tenth and
Ludlow Streets result, in the discovery that this Bohem-
ian's butcher's bill for the week, with meat at twelve cents
a pound as in Ludlow Street, is from two dollars and a
half to three dollars. The Polish Jew fed as big a family
on one pound of meat a day. The difference proves to
be typical. Here is a suit of three rooms, two dark, three
flights up. The ceiling is partly down in one of the rooms.
" It is three months since we asked the landlord to fix it,"
says the oldest son, a very intelligent lad who has learned
English in tm evening school. His father has not had
that advantage, and has sat at his bench, deaf and dumb to
the world about him except his own, for six years. He
has improved his time and become an expert at his trade.
Father, mother, and son together, a full team, make from
fifteen to sixteen dollars a week.

A man with venerable beard and keen eyes answers our
questions through an interpreter, in the next house. Yery
few brighter faces would be met in a day's walk among
American mechanics, yet lie has in nine years learned no
syllable of English. German he probably does not want
to learn. His story supplies the explanation, as did the
stories of the others. In all that time he has been at
work grubbing to earn bread. Wife and he by constant

142

HOW THE OTHER HALE LIYE8.

labor make three thousand cigars a week, earning SH-25
when there is no lack of material ; when in winter they
receive from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thou-
sand, the rent of S10 for two rooms, practically one with a
dark alcove, has nevertheless to be paid in full, and six
mouths to be fed. He was a blacksmith in the old coun-
try, but cannot work at his trade here because he does not
understand " Engliska." If he could, he says, with a bright
look, he could do better work than he sees done here. It
would seem happiness to him to knock off: at 6 o'clock in-
stead of working, as he now often has to do, till midnight.
But how ? He knows of no Bohemian blacksmith who
can understand him ; he should starve. Here, with his
wife, he can make a living at least. " Aye," says she, turn-
ing, from listening, to her household duties, " it would be
nice for sure to have father work at his trade." Then
what a home she could make for them, and how happy
they would be. Here is an unattainable ideal, indeed,
of a workman in the most prosperous city in the world !
There is genuine, if unspoken, pathos in the soft tap she
gives her husband's hand as she goes about her work with
a half -suppressed little sigh.

The verv ash-barrels that stand in front of the big rows
of tenements in Seventy-first and Seventy-third Streets
advertise the business that is carried on within. They are
filled to the brim with the stems of stripped tobacco leaves.
The rank smell that waited for us on the corner of the
block follows us into the hallways, penetrates every nook
and cranny f the houses. As in the settlement farther
down town, every room here has its work-bench with its
stumpy knife and queer pouch of bed-tick, worn brown
and greasy, fastened in front the whole length of the
bench to receive the scraps of waste. This landlord-em-

144

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ployer at all events gives three rooms for $12.50, if two
be dark, one wholly and the other getting some light
from the front room. The mother of the three bare-footed
little children we met on the stairs was taken to the hos-
pital the other day when she could no longer work. She
will never come out alive. There is no waste in these ten-
ements. Lives, like clothes, are worn through and out be-
fore put aside. Her place at the bench is taken already
by another who divides with the head of the household
his earnings of $15.50 a week. He has just come out suc-
cessful of a strike that brought the pay of these tene-
ments up to $4.50 per thousand cigars. Kotice to quit
had already been served on them, when the employer
decided to give in, frightened by the prospective loss of
rent. Asked how long he works, the man says : " from
they can see till bed-time." Bed-time proves to be eleven
o'clock. Seventeen hours a day, seven days in the week,
at thirteen cents an hour for the two, six cents and a half
for each ! Good average earnings for a tenement-house
cigarmaker in summer. In winter it is at least one-
fourth less. In spite of it all, the rooms are cleanly kept.
From the bedroom farthest back the woman brings out
a pile of moist tobacco-lea ves to be stripped. They are
kept there, under cover lest they dry and crack, from Fri-
day to Friday, when an accounting is made and fresh
supplies given out. The people sleep there too, but the
smell, offensive to the unfamiliar nose, does not bother
them. They are used to it.

In a house around the corner that is not a factory-tene-
ment, lives now the cigarmaker I spoke of as suffering
from consumption which the doctor said was due to the
tobacco-fumes. Perhaps the lack of healthy exercise had
as much to do with it. His case is interesting from its

THE BOHEMIANS.

145

own stand-point. He too is one with a — for a Bohemian
— large family. Six children sit at his table. By trade
a shoemaker, for thirteen years he helped his wife make
cigars in the manufacturers tenement. She was a very
good hand, and until his health gave out two years ago they
were able to make from §17 to $25 a week, by lengthen-
ing the day at both ends. Now that he can work no
more, and the family under the doctor's orders has moved
away from the smell of tobacco, the burden of its support
has fallen upon her alone, for none of the children are old
enough to help. She has work in the shop at eight dol-
lars a week, and this must go round ; it is all there is.
Happily, this being a tenement for revenue only, unmixed
with cigars, the rent is cheaper : seven dollars for two
bright rooms on the top floor. ]STo housekeeping is at-
tempted. A woman in Seventy-second Street supplies
their cooking, which the wife and mother fetches in a
basket, her husband being too weak. Breakfast of coffee
and hard-tack, or black bread, at twenty cents for the
whole eight; a good many, the little woman says with a
brave, patient smile, and there is seldom anything to

spare, bat ■. The invalid is listening, and the sentence

remains unfinished. What of dinner ? One of the chil-
dren brings it from the cook. Oh ! it is a good dinner,
meat, soup, greens and bread, all for thirty cents. It is
the principal family meal. Does she come home for din-
ner? Xo ; she cannot leave the shop, but gets a bite at
her bench. The question : A bite of what ? seems as mer-
ciless as the surgeon's knife, and she winces under it as
one shrinks from physical pain. Bread, then. But at
night they all have supper together — sausage and bread.
For ten cents they can eat all they want. Can they not ?
she says, stroking the hair of the little boy at her knee ;
10

146

HOW THE OTHEPw HALF LIVES.

his eyes glisten hungrily at the thought, as he nods stout-
ly in support of his mother. Only, she adds, the week
the rent is due, they have to shorten rations to pay the
landlord.

But what of his being an Anarchist, this Bohemian — an
infidel — I hear somebody say. Almost one might be per-
suaded by such facts as these — and they are everyday
facts, not fancy — to retort : what more natural ? With
every hand raised against him in the old land and the
new, in the land of his hoped-for freedom, what more
logical than that his should be turned against society that
seems to exist only for his oppression ? But the charge
is not half true. Naturally the Bohemian loves peace, as
he loves music and song. As someone has said : He
does not seek war, but when attacked knows better how to
die than how to surrender. The Czech is the Irishman
of Central Europe, with all his genius and his strong pas-
sions, with the same bitter traditions of landlord-robbery,
perpetuated here where he thought to forget them ; like
him ever and on principle in the opposition, " agin the
government" wherever he goes. Among such a people,
ground by poverty until their songs have died in curses
upon their oppressors, hopelessly isolated and ignorant of
our language and our laws, it would not be hard for bad
men at any time to lead a few astray. And this is what
has been done. Yet, even with the occasional noise made
by the few, the criminal statistics already alluded to quite
dispose of the charge that they incline to turbulence and
riot. So it *s with the infidel propaganda, the legacy per-
haps of the fierce contention through hundreds of years
between Catholics and Protestants on Bohemia's soil, of
bad faith and savage persecutions in the name of the
Christians' God that disgrace its history. The Bohemian

THE BOHEMIANS.

147

clergyman, who spoke for his people at the Christian Con-
ference held in Chickering Hall two years ago, took even
stronger ground. " They are Eoraan Catholics by birth,
infidels by necessity, and Protestants by history and in-
clination," he said. Yet he added his testimony in the
same breath to the fact that, though the Freethinkers had
started two schools in the immediate neighborhood of his
church to counteract its influence, his flock had grown
in a few years from a mere handful at the start to propor-
tions far beyond his hopes, gathering in both Anarchists
and Freethinkers, and making good church members of
them.

Thus the whole matter resolves itself once more into a
question of education, all the more urgent because these
people are poor, miserably poor almost to a man. " There
is not," said one of them, who knew thoroughly what he
was speaking of, " there is not one of them all, who, if he
were to sell all he was worth to-morrow, would have
money enough to buy a house and lot in the country."

CHAPTER XIII.

THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK.

FT HIE color line must be drawn through the tenements to
give the picture its proper shading. The landlord
does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretence, a
frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not brutal.
The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his
own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with
colored tenants. Where he permits them to live, they
go ; where he shuts the door, stay out. By his grace they
exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them
from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid
at his door, with unruffled complacency. It is business,
he will tell you. And it is. He makes the prejudice in
which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it
quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for.

That his pencil does not make quite as black a mark as
it did, that the hand that wields it does not bear down as
hard as only a short half dozen years ago, is the hopeful
sign of an awakening public conscience under the stress of
which the line shows signs of wavering. But for this the
^ landlord deserves no credit. It has come, is coming about
despite him. The line may not be wholly effaced while
the name of the negro, alone among the world's races, is
spelled with a small n. Natural selection will have more
or less to do beyond a doubt in every age with dividing
the races ; only so, it may be, can they work out together

THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK.

149

their highest destiny. But with the despotism that de-
liberately assigns to the defenceless Black the lowest level
for the purpose of robbing him there that has nothing to
do. Of such slavery, different only in degree from the
other kind that held him as a chattel, to be sold or bar-
tered at the will of his master, this century, if signs fail
not, will see the end in Xew York.

Ever since the war Xew York has been receiving the
overflow of colored population from the Southern cities.
In the last decade this migration has grown to such pro-
portions that it is estimated that our Blacks have quite
doubled in number since the Tenth Census. Whether the
exchange has been of advantage to the negro may well be
questioned. Trades of which he had practical control in
his Southern home are not open to him here. I know that
it may be answered that there is no industrial proscription '
of color ; that it is a matter of choice. Perhaps so. At
all events he does not choose then. How many colored
carpenters or masons has anyone seen at work in Xew
York ? In the South there are enough of them and, if
the testimony of the most intelligent of their people is
worth anything, plenty of them have come here. As a
matter of fact the colored man takes in Xew York, with-
out a struggle, the lower level of menial service for which
his past traditions and natural love of ease perhaps as yet
fit him best. Even the colored barber is rapidly getting
to be a thing of the past. Along shore, at any unskilled
labor, he works unmolested ; but he does not appear to
prefer the job. His sphere thus defined, he naturally
takes his stand among the poor, and in the homes of the
poor. Until very recent times — the years since a change
was wrought can be counted on the fingers of one hand —
he was practically restricted in the choice of a home to a

150 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

narrow section on the West Side, that nevertheless had a
social top and bottom to it — the top in the tenements on
the line of Seventh Avenue as far north as Thirty-second
Street, where he was allowed to occupy the houses of un-
savory reputation which the police had cleared and for
which decent white tenants could not be found ; the bot-
tom in the vile rookeries of Thompson Street and South
Fifth Avenue, the old " Africa" that is now fast becom-
ing a modern Italy. To-day there are black colonies in
Yorkville and Morrisania. The encroachment of business
and the Italian below, and the swelling of the population
above, have been the chief agents in working out his sec-
ond emancipation, a very real one, for with his cutting
loose from the old tenements there has come a distinct
and gratifying improvement in the tenant, that argues
louder than theories or speeches the influence of vile sur-
roundings in debasing the man. The colored citizen
whom this year's census man found in his Ninety-ninth
Street " flat " is a very different individual from the "nig-
ger" his predecessor counted in the black-and-tan slums
of Thompson and Sullivan Streets. There is no more
clean and orderly community in New York than the new
settlement of colored people that is growing up on the
East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.

Cleanliness is the characteristic of the negro in his new
surroundings, as it was his virtue in the old. In this re-
spect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the
whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he
has been clasped in the past in the tenant scale. Never-
theless, he has always had to pay higher rents than even
these for the poorest and most stinted rooms. The ex-
ceptions I have come across, in which the rents, though
high, have seemed more nearly on a level with what was

THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK.

151

asked for the same number and size of rooms In the av-
erage tenement, were in the case of tumble-down rookeries
in which no one else would live, and were always coupled
with the condition that the landlord should " make no
repairs." It can readily be seen, that his profits were
scarcely curtailed by his "humanity." The reason ad-
vanced for this systematic robbery is that white people
will not live in the same house with colored tenants, or
even in a house recently occupied by negroes, and that
consequently its selling value is injured. The prejudice
undoubtedly exists, but it is not lessened by the house
agents, who have set up the maxim " once a colored house,
always a colored house."

There is method in the maxim, as shown by an inquiry
made last year by the Real Estate Record. It proved
agents to be practically unanimous in the endorsement of
the negro as a clean, orderly, and " profitable " tenant.
Here is the testimony of one of the largest real estate
firms in the city : " We would rather have negro tenants
in our poorest class of tenements than the lower grades of
foreign white people. We find the former cleaner than
the latter, and they do not destroy the property so much.
We also get higher prices. We have a tenement on Nine-
teenth Street, where we get $10 for two rooms which we
could not get more than §7.50 for from white tenants pre-
viously. We have a four-story tenement on our books on
Thirty-third Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues,
with four rooms per floor — a parlor, two bedrooms, and
a kitchen. We get $20 for the first floor, $24 for the
second, $23 for the third and $20 for the fourth, in all
$87 or $1,044 per annum. The size of the building is
only 21+55." Another firm declared that in a specified
instance they had saved fifteen to twenty per cent, on the

152

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

gross rentals since they changed their white tenants for
colored ones. Still another gave the following case of a
front and rear tenement that had formerly been occupied
by tenants of a " low European type," who had been turned
out on account of filthy habits and poor pay. The ne-
groes proved cleaner, better, and steadier tenants. In-
stead, however, of having their rents reduced in conse-
quence, the comparison stood as follows :

Jtents under White Tenants.

Per month.

Front — 1st floor (store, etc.) $21

2d " 13

3d " 13

4th " (and rear) 21

Rear— 2d " 12

3d " 12

4th " (see front) —

Rear house — 1st '- 8

2d " 10

3d " 9

4th " 8

Total $127

Rents under Colored Tenants.

Per month.

Front— 1st floor (store, etc.) $21

2d 14

3d " 14

4th " 14

Rear— 2d " 12

3d 4i IS

4th " 13

Rear house — 1st " 10

2d " 12

3d *' 11

4th " 10

Total ....$144

An increased rental of $17 per month, or $204 a year,
and an advance of nearly thirteen and one-half per cent,
on the gross rental " in favor " of the colored tenant.
Profitable, surely !

I have quoted these cases at length in order to let in light
on the quality of this landlord despotism that has pur-
posely confused the public mind, and for its own selfish ends
is propping up a waning prejudice. It will be cause for
congratulation if indeed its time has come at last. Within
a year, I am told by one of the most intelligent and best
informed of our colored citizens, there has been evidence,
simultaneous with the colored hegira from the low down-
town tenements, of a movement toward less exorbitant
rents. I cannot pass from this subject without adding a
leaf from my own experience that deserves a place in this

THE COLOR LIXE IN NEW YORK.

153

record, though, for the credit of humanity, I hope as an
extreme case. It was last Christmas that I had occasion to
visit the home of an old colored woman in Sixteenth
Street, as the almoner of generous friends out of town
who wished me to buy her a Christmas dinner. The old
woman lived in a wretched shanty, occupying two mean,
dilapidated rooms at the top of a sort of hen-ladder that
went by the name of stairs. For these she paid ten dol-
lars a month out of her hard-earned wages as a scrub-
woman. I did not find her in and, being informed that
she was " at the agent's," went around to hunt her up.
The agent's wife appeared, to report that Ann was out.
Being in a hurry it occurred to me that I might save time
by making her employer the purveyor of my friend's
bounty, and proposed to entrust the money, two dollars,
to her to be expended for Old Ann's benefit. She fell in
with the suggestion at once, and confided to me in the full-
ness of her heart that she liked the plan, inasmuch as " I
generally find her a Christmas dinner myself, and this

money — she owes Mr. (her husband, the agent) a lot

of rent." xS eedless to state that there was a change of
programme then and there, and that Ann was saved from
the sort of Christmas cheer that woman's charity would
have spread before her. When I had the old soul com-
fortably installed in her own den, with a chicken and
" fixin's " and a bright fire in her stove, I asked her how
much she owed of her rent. Her answer was that she
did not really owe anything, her month not being quite
up, but that the amount yet unpaid was — two dollars !

Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts
with imperturbable cheerfulness. His philosophy is of
the kind that has no room for repining. Whether he
lives in an Eighth Ward barrack or in a tenement with a

154

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

brown-stone front and pretensions to the title of "flat,'*
he looks at the sunny side of life and enjoys it. He loves
fine clothes and good living a good deal more than he
does a bank account. The proverbial rainy day it would
be rank ingratitude, from his point of view, to look for
when the sun shines unclouded in a clear sky. His home
surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflect
his blithesome temper. The poorest negro housekeeper's
room in New York is bright with gaily-colored prints of
his beloved "Abe Linkum," General Grant, President
Garfield, Mrs. Cleveland, and other national celebrities,
and cheery with flowers and singing birds. In the art of
putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty
by making a little go a long way, our negro has no equal.
When a fair share of prosperity is his, he knows how to
make life and home very pleasant to those about him.
Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown homes
of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air.
But even where the wolf howls at the door, he makes a
bold and gorgeous front. The amount of "style" dis-
played on fine Sundays on Sixth and Seventh Avenues by
colored holiday-makers would turn a pessimist black with
wrath. The negro's great ambition is to rise in the social
scale to which his color has made him a stranger and an
outsider, and he is quite willing to accept the shadow for
the substance where that is the best he can get. The
claw-hammer coat and white tie of a waiter in a first-class
summer hotel, with the chance of taking his ease in six
months of winter, are to him the next best thing to min-
gling with the white quality he serves, on equal terms.
His festive gatherings, pre-eminently his cake-walks, at
which a sugared and frosted cake is the proud prize of the
couple with the most aristocratic step and carriage, are com-

THE COLOK LINE IN NEW YORK.

155

ic mixtures of elaborate ceremonial and the joyous aban-
don of the natural man. With all his ludicrous incongrui-
ties, his sensuality and his lack of moral accountability, his
superstition and other faults that are the effect of tempera-
ment and of centuries of slavery, he has his eminently
good points. He is loyal to the backbone, proud of being
an American and of his new-found citizenship. He is at
least as easily moulded for good as for evil. His churches
are crowded to the doors on Sunday nights when the col-
ored colony turns out to worship. His people own church
property in this city upon which they have paid half a
million dollars out of the depth of their poverty, with
comparatively little assistance from their white brethren.
He is both willing and anxious to learn, and his intellect-
ual status is distinctly improving. If his emotions are
not very deeply rooted, they are at least sincere while
they last, and until the tempter gets the upper hand again.

Of all the temptations that beset him, the one that
troubles him and the police most is his passion for gam-
bling. The game of policy is a kind of unlawful penny
lottery specially adapted to his means, but patronized ex-
tensively by poor white players as well. It is the mean-
est of swindles, but reaps for its backers rich fortunes
wherever colored people congregate. Between the for-
tune-teller and the policy shop, closely allied frauds al-
ways, the wages of many a hard day's work are wasted
by the negro ; but the loss causes him few regrets. Pen-
niless, but with undaunted faith in his ultimate " luck,"
he looks forward to the time when he shall once more be
able to take a hand at " beating policy." When periodi-
cally the negro's lucky numbers, 4—11-44, come out on
the slips of the alleged daily drawings, that are supposed
to be held in some far-off Western town, intense excite-

156

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ment reigns in Thompson Street and along the Avenue,
where someone is always the winner. An immense im-
petus is given then to the bogus business that has no ex-
istence outside of the cigar stores and candy shops where
it hides from the law, save in some cunning Bowery
"broker's" back office, where the slips are printed and
the " winnings " apportioned daily with due regard to the
backer's interests.

It is a question whether " Africa " has been improved by
the advent of the Italian, with the tramp from the Mul-
berry Street Bend in his train. The moral turpitude of
Thompson Street has been notorious for years, and the
mingling of the three elements does not seem to have
wrought any change for the better. The border-land
where the white and black races meet in common de-
bauch, the aptly-named black-and-tan saloon, has never
been debatable ground from a moral stand-point. It has
always been the worst of the desperately bad. Than this
commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white
and black, on such ground, there can be no greater abomina-
tion. Usually it is some foul cellar dive, perhaps run by
the political "leader" of the district, who is "in with"
the police. In any event it gathers to itself all the law-
breakers and all the human wrecks within reach. When
a fight breaks out during the dance a dozen razors are
handy in as many boot-legs, and there is always a job for
the surgeon and the ambulance. The black " tough " is
as handy with the razor in a fight as his peaceably inclined
brother is with it in pursuit of his honest trade. As the
Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve and the Italian his
stiletto in the bosom, so the negro goes to the ball wTith a
razor in his boot-leg, and on occasion does as much execu-
tion with it as both of the others together. More than

158

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

three-fourths of the business the police have with the coL
ored people in New York arises in the black-and-tan dis-
trict, now no longer fairly representative of their color.

I have touched briefly upon such facts in the negro's life
as may serve to throw light on the social condition of his
people in New York. If, when the account is made up
between the races, it shall be claimed that he falls short of
the result to be expected from twenty-five years of free-
dom, it may be well to turn to the other side of the ledger
and see how much of the blame is borne by the prejudice
and greed that have kept him from rising under a burden
of responsibility to which he could hardly be equal. And
in this view he may be seen to have advanced much
farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise,
after all, with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest of
us, his white-skinned fellow-citizens, had any right to ex-
pect.

CHAPTER XIY.

THE COMMON HERD.

THERE is another line not always so readily drawn in
the tenements, yet the real boundary line of the Other
Half : the one that defines the " flat.'- The law does not
draw it at all, accounting all flats tenements without dis-
tinction. The health officer draws it from observation,
lumping all those which in his judgment have nothing, or
not enough, to give them claim upon the name, with the
common herd, and his way is, perhaps, on the whole, the
surest and best. The outside of the building gives no
valuable clew. Brass and brown-stone go well sometimes
with dense crowds and dark and dingy rooms ; but the
first attempt to enter helps draw the line with tolerable
distinctness. A locked door is a strong point in favor of
the flat. It argues that the first step has been taken to
secure privacy, the absence of which is the chief curse of
the tenement. Behind a locked door the hoodlum is not
at home, unless there be a jailor in place. of a janitor to
guard it. Xot that the janitor and the door-bell are in-
fallible. There may be a tenement behind a closed door ;
but never a " flat " without it. The hall that is a high-
way for all the world by night and by day is the tene-
ment's proper badge. The Other Half ever receives with
open doors.

With this introduction we shall not seek it long any-
where in the city. Below Houston Street the door-bell in

160

HOW THE OTHEE HALF LIVES.

our age is as extinct as the dodo. East of Second Avenue,
and west of £smth Avenue as far up as the Park, it is
practically an unknown institution. The nearer the river
and the great workshops the more numerous the tene-
ments. The kind of work carried on in any locality to a
large extent determines their character. Skilled and well-
paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of

THE OPEN DOOR.

the open door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell.
Gas-houses, slaughter-houses and the docks, that attract
the roughest crowds and support the vilest saloons, invari-
ably form slum-centres. The city is full of such above
the line of Fourteenth Street, that is erroneously supposed
by some to fence off the good from the bad, separate the
chaff from the wheat. There is nothing below that line
that can outdo in wickedness Hell's Kitchen, in the region

THE COMMON HERD.

161

of three-cent whiskey, or its counterpoise at the other end
of Thirty-ninth Street, on the East .River, the home of the
infamous Rag Gang. Cherry Street is not "tougher"
than Battle How in East Sixty-third Street, or " the vil-
lage " at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue, where
stores of broken bricks, ammunition for the nightly con-
flicts with the police, are part of the regulation outfit of
every tenement. The Mulberry Street Bend is scarce
dirtier than Little Italy in Harlem. Even across the Har-
lem River, Frog Hollow challenges the admiration of the
earlier slums for the boldness and pernicious activity of
its home gang. There are enough of these sore spots.
We shall yet have occasion to look into the social con-
ditions of some of them ; were I to draw a picture of
them here as they are, the subject, I fear, would outgrow
alike the limits of this book and the reader's patience.

It is true that they tell only one side of the story ; that
there is another to tell. A story of thousands of devoted
lives, laboring earnestly to make the most of their scant
opportunities for good ; of heroic men and women striv-
ing patiently against fearful odds and by their very cour-
age coming off victors in the battle with the tenement ; of
womanhood pure and undefiled. That it should blossom
in such an atmosphere is one of the unfathomable myste-
ries of life. And yet it is not an uncommon thing to find
sweet and innocent girls, singularly untouched by the evil
around them, true wives and faithful mothers, literally
"like jewels in a swine's snout," in the worst of the in-
famous barracks. It is the experience of all who have in-
telligently observed this side of life in a great city, not to
be explained — unless on the theory of my friend, the priest
in the Mulberry Street Bend, that inherent purity revolts
instinctively from the naked brutality of vice as seen in
11

162

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

the slums — but to be thankfully accepted as the one gleam
of hope in an otherwise hopeless desert.

But the relief is not great. In the dull content of life
bred on the tenement-house dead level there is little to re-
deem it, or to calm apprehension for a society that has
nothing better to offer its toilers ; while the patient efforts
of the lives finally attuned to it to render the situation
tolerable, and the very success of these efforts, serve only
to bring out in stronger contrast the general gloom of the
picture by showing how much farther they might have
gone with half a chance. Go into any of the " respect-
able " tenement neighborhoods — the fact that there are
not more than two saloons on the corner, nor over three
or four in the block will serve as a fair guide — where live
the great body of hard-working Irish and German immi-
grants and their descendants, who accept naturally the con-
ditions of tenement life, because for them there is nothing
else in Xew York ; be with and among its people until
you understand their ways, their aims, and the quality of
their ambitions, and unless you can content yourself wTith
the scriptural promise that the poor we shall have always
with us, or with the menagerie view that, if fed, they have
no cause of complaint, you shall come away agreeing with
me that, humanly speaking, life there does not seem
worth the living. Take at random one of these uptown
tenement blocks, not of the worst nor yet of the most
prosperous kind, within hail of what the newspapers would
call a " fine residential section." These houses were built
since the last cholera scare made people willing to listen
to reason. The block is not like the one over on the
East Side in which I actually lost my way once. There
were thirty or forty rear houses in the heart of it, three
or four on every lot, set at all sorts of angles, with odd,

THE COMMON HERD. 163

winding passages, or no passage at all, only " runways "
for the thieves and toughs of the neighborhood. These
yards are clear. There is air there, and it is about all
there is. The view between brick walls outside is that of
a stony street ; inside, of rows of unpainted board fences,
a bewildering maze of clothes-posts and lines; underfoot, a
desert of brown, hard-baked soil from which every blade
of grass, every stray weed, every speck of green, has been

bird's-eye VIEW of an east pipe tenement block, (from a drawing by

CHARLES F. WINGATE, ESQ.)

trodden out, as must inevitably be every gentle thought
and aspiration above the mere wants of the body in those
whose moral natures such home surroundings are to nour-
ish. In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accom-
modates itself to its environment, and human life is no
exception. Within the house there is nothing to supply
the want thus left unsatisfied. Tenement-houses have
no [esthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear
on them, they must come from the outside. There is the
common hall with doors opening softly on every landing

164

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

as the strange step is heard on the stairs, the air-shaft that
seems always so busy letting out foul stenches from below
that it has no time to earn its name by bringing down
fresh air, the squeaking pumps that hold no water, and
the rent that is never less than one week's wages out of
the four, quite as often half of the family earnings.

Why complete the sketch ? It is drearily familiar al-
ready. Such as it is, it is the frame in which are set days,
weeks, months, and years of unceasing toil, just able to fill
the mouth and clothe the back. Such as it is, it is the
world, and all of it, to which these weary workers return
nightly to feed heart and brain after wearing out the body
at the bench, or in the shop. To it come the young with
their restless yearnings, perhaps to pass on the threshold
one of the daughters of sin, driven to the tenement by the
police when they raided her den, sallying forth in silks
and fine attire after her day of idleness. These in their
coarse garments — girls with the love of youth for beauti-
ful things, with this hard life before them — who shall save
them from the tempter ? Down in the street the saloon,
always bright and gay, gathering to itself all the cheer of
the block, beckons the boys. In many such blocks the
census- taker found two thousand men, women, and chil-
dren, and over, who called them home.

The picture is faithful enough to stand for its class
wherever along both rivers the Irish brogue is heard. As
already said, the Celt falls most readily victim to tene-
ment influences since shanty-town and its original free-
soilers have become things of the past. If he be thrifty
and shrewd lis progress thenceforward is along the plane
of the tenement, on which he soon assumes to manage
without improving things. The German has an advan-
tage over his Celtic neighbor in his strong love for flow-

THE COMMON HEED.

165

ers, which not all the tenements on the East Side have
power to smother. His garden goes with him wherever
he goes. iSot that it represents any high moral principle
in the man ; rather perhaps the capacity for it. He turns
his saloon into a shrubbery as soon as his back-yard. But
wherever he puts it in a tenement block it does the work
of a dozen police clubs. In proportion as it spreads the
neighborhood takes on a more orderly character. As the
green dies out of the landscape and increases in political
importance, the police find more to do. Where it dis-
appears altogether from sight, lapsing into a mere sen-
timent, police-beats are shortened and the force patrols
double at night. Neither the man nor the sentiment is
wholly responsible for this. It is the tenement unadorned
that is. The changing of Tompkins Square from a sand
lot into a beautiful park put an end for good and all to the
Bread and Blood riots of which it used to be the scene,
and transformed a nest of dangerous agitators into a
harmless, beer-craving band of Anarchists. They have
scarcely been heard of since. Opponents of the small
parks system as a means of relieving the congested popu-
lation of tenement districts, please take note.

With the first hot nights in June police despatches, that
record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs
and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of
greatest suffering among the poor is at hand. It is in hot
weather, when life indoors is well-nigh unbearable with
cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small
rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all
restraint. Then a strange and picturesque life moves
upon the flat roofs. In the day and early evening moth-
ers air their babies there, the boys fly their kites from
the house-tops, undismayed by police regulations, and the

166

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

young men and girls court and pass the growler. In the
stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery
furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men
and women lie in restless, sweltering rows, panting for
air and sleep. Then every truck in the street, every

crowded fire-escape, becomes
a bedroom, infinitely prefer-
able to any the house affords.
A cooling shower on such a
night is hailed as a heaven-
sent blessing in a hundred
thousand homes.

Life in the tenements in
July and August spells death
to an army of little ones whom
the doctor's skill is powerless
to save. When the white
badge of mourning Gutters
from every second door, sleep-
less mothers walk the streets
in the gray of the early dawn,
trying to stir a cooling breeze
to fan the brow of the sick
baby. There is no sadder
sight than this patient devo-
tion striving against fearfully hopeless odds. Fifty " sum-
mer doctors," especially trained to this work, are then
sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with
free advice and medicine for the poor. Devoted women
follow in their track with care and nursing for the sick.
Fresh -air excursions run daily out of New York on land
and water ; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in
Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked

THE HERD.

167

mountains high on the deck of the Charity Commission-
ers' boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city
cemetery.

Under the most favorable circumstances, an epidemic,
which the well-to-do can afford to make light of as a thing
to be got over or avoided by reasonable care, is excessively
fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the
practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tene-
ment. The measles, ordinarily a harmless disease, fur-
nishes a familiar example. Tread it ever so lightly on the
avenues, in the tenements it kills right and left. Such
an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks in Elizabeth
Street on the heels of the grippe last winter, and, when it
had spent its fury, the death-maps in the Bureau of Vital
Statistics looked as if a black hand had been laid across
those blocks, over-shadowing in part the contiguous ten-
ements in Mott Street, and with the thumb covering a
particularly packed settlement of half a dozen houses in
Mulberry Street. The track of the epidemic through
these teeming barracks was as clearly defined as the track
of a tornado through a forest district. There were houses
in which as many as eight little children had died in five
months. The records showed that respiratory diseases,
the common heritage of the grippe and the measles, had
caused death in most cases, discovering the trouble to be,
next to the inability to check the contagion in those
crowds, in the poverty of the parents and the wretched
home conditions that made proper care of the sick impos-
sible. The fact was emphasized by the occurrence here
and there of a few isolated deaths from diphtheria and
scarlet fever. In the case of these diseases, considered
more dangerous to the public health, the health officers
exercised summary powers of removal to the hospital

168

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

where proper treatment could be had, and the result was a
low death-rate.

These were tenements of the tall, modern tjpe. A lit-
tle more than a year ago, when a census was made of the
tenements and compared with the mortality tables, no
little surprise and congratulation was caused by the dis-
covery that as the buildings grew taller the death-rate fell.
The reason is plain, though the reverse had been expected
by most people. The biggest tenements have been built
in the last ten years of sanitary reform rule, and have been
brought, in all but the crowding, under its laws. The old
houses that from private dwellings were made into tene-
ments, or were run up to house the biggest crowds in de-
fiance of every moral and physical law, can be improved
by no device short of demolition. They will ever remain
the worst.

That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty and
bad hygienic surroundings, in the sacrifice of life is of
course inevitable. They go usually hand in hand. A
message came one day last spring summoning me to a
Mott Street tenement in which lay a child dying from
some unknown disease. With the " charity doctor " I
found the pa dent on the top floor, stretched upon two
chairs in a dreadfully stifling room. She was gasping in
the agony of peritonitis that had already written its death-
sentence on her wan and pinched face. The whole fam-
ily, father, mother, and four ragged children, sat around
looking on with the stony resignation of helpless despair
that had long since given up the fight against fate as use-
less. A glance around the wretched room left no doubt
as to the cause of the child's condition. " Improper nour-
ishment," said the doctor, which, translated to suit the
place, meant starvation. The father's hands were crip-

THE COMMON HERD.

169

pled from lead poisoning. He had not been able to work
for a year. A contagious disease of the eyes, too long neg-
lected, had made the mother and one of the boys nearly

IK POVERTY GAP, WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH ST. AN ENGLISH COAL-HE AVER'S HOME.*

blind. The children cried with hunger. They had not
broken their fast that day, and it was then near noon.

* Suspicions of murder, in the case of a woman who was found dead,
covered with bruises, after a day's running fight with her husband, in
which the beer-jug had been tbe bone of contention, brought me to
this house, a ramshackle tenement on tbe tail-end of a lot over near
the North River docks. Tbe family in the picture lived above the
rooms where the dead woman lay on a bed of straw, overrun by rats,
and had been uninterested witnesses of the affray that was an every-
day occurrence in the house. A patched and sbaky stairway led up to

170

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

For months the family had subsisted on two dollars a
week from the priest, and a few loaves and a piece of
corned beef which the sisters sent them on Saturday. The
doctor gave direction for the treatment of the child, know-
ing that it was possible only to alleviate its sufferings un-
til death should end them, and left some money for food
for the rest. An hour later, when I returned, I found
them feeding the dying child with ginger ale, bought for
two cents a bottle at the pedlar's cart down the street. A
pitying neighbor had proposed it as the one thing she
could think of as likely to make the child forget its mis-
ery. There was enough in the bottle to go round to the
rest of the family. In fact, the wake had already begun ;
before night it was under way in dead earnest.

Every once in a while a case of downright starvation
gets into the newspapers and makes a sensation. But
this is the exception. Were the whole truth known, it
would come home to the community with a shock that
would rouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic
undoing of its purse-strings. I am satisfied from my own
observation that hundreds of men, women, and children

their one bare and miserable room, in comparison witli which a white-
washed prison-cell seemed a real palace. A heap of old rags, in which
the baby slept serenely, served as the common sleeping-bunk of fath-
er, mother, and children — two bright and pretty girls, singularly out of
keeping in their clean, if coarse, dresses, with their surroundings. The
father, a slow-going, honest English coal-heaver, earned on the aver-
age five dollars a week, il when work was fairly brisk," at the docks.
But there were long seasons when it was very "slack," he said, doubt-
fully. Yet the prospect did not seem to discourage them. The mother,
a pleasant-faced woman, was cheerful, even light-hearted. Her smile
seemed the most sadly hopeless of all in the utter wretchedness of the
place, cheery though it was meant to be and really was. It seemed
doomed to certain disappointment — the one thing there that was yet
to know a greater depth of misery.

THE COMMON HERD.

171

are every day slowly starving to death in the tenements
with my medical friend's complaint of " improper nourish-
ment." Within a single week I have had this year three
cases of insanity, provoked directly by poverty and want.
One was that of a mother who in the middle of the night
got up to murder her child, who was crying for food ;
another was the case of an Elizabeth Street truck-driver
whom the newspapers never heard of. With a family to
provide for, he had been unable to work for many months.
There was neither food, nor a scrap of anything upon
which money could be raised, left in the house ; his mind
gave way under the combined physical and mental suf-
fering. In the third case I was just in time with the po-
lice to prevent the madman from murdering his whole
family. He had the sharpened hatchet in his pocket when
we seized him. He was an Irish laborer, and had been
working in the sewers until the poisonous gases destroyed
his health. Then he was laid off, and scarcely anything
had been coming in all winter but the oldest child's earn-
ings as cash-girl in a store, $2.50 a week. There were
seven children to provide for, and the rent of the Mulberry
Street attic in which the family lived was $10 a month.
They had borrowed as long as anybody had a cent to lend.
When at last the man got an odd job that would just
buy the children bread, the week's wages only served to
measure the depth of their misery. " It came in so on the
tail-end of everything," said his wife in telling the story,
with unconscious eloquence. The outlook worried him
through sleepless nights until it destroyed his reason. In
his madness he had only one conscious thought : that the
town should not take the children. " Better that I take
care of them myself," he repeated to himself as he ground
the axe to an edge. Help came in abundance from many

172

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

almost as poor as they when the desperate straits of the
family became known through his arrest. The readiness
of the poor to share what little they have with those
who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of
the tenements. Their enormous crowds touch elbow in
a closeness of sympathy that is scarcely to be understood
out of them, and has no parallel except among the unfor-
tunate women whom the world scorns as outcasts. There
is very little professed sentiment about it to draw a senti-
mental tear from the eye of romantic philanthropy. The
hard fact is that the instinct of self-preservation impels
them to make common cause against the common misery.

No doubt intemperance bears a large share of the blame
for it ; judging from the stand-point of the policeman per-
haps the greater share. TwO such entries as I read in
the police returns on successive days last March, of moth-
ers in West Side tenements, who, in their drunken sleep,
lay upon and killed their infants, go far to support such a
position. And they are far from uncommon. But my
experience has shown me another view of it, a view which
the last report of the Society for Improving the Condition
of the Poor seems more than half inclined to adopt in
allotting to " intemperance the cause of distress, or distress
the cause of intemperance," forty per cent, of the cases it
is called upon to deal with. Even if it were all true, I
should still load over upon the tenement the heaviest re-
sponsibility. A single factor, the scandalous scarcity of
water in the hot summer when the thirst of the million
tenants must be quenched, if not in that in something
else, has in the past years more than all other causes en-
couraged drunkenness among the poor. But to my mind
there is a closer connection between the wages of the tene-
ments and the vices and improvidence of those who dwell

THE COMMON HERD. 173
i

in them than, with the guilt of the tenement upon our
heads, we are willing to admit even to ourselves. Weak
tea with a dry crust is not a diet to nurse moral strength.
Yet how much better might the fare be expected to be in
the family of this " widow with seven children, very ener-
getic and prudent " — I quote again from the report of the
Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor
— whose " eldest girl was employed as a learner in a
tailors shop at small wages, and one boy had a place as
* cash ' in a store. There were two other little boys who
sold papers and sometimes earned one dollar. The mother
finishes pantaloons and can do three pairs in a day, thus
earning thirty-nine cents. Here is a family of eight per-
sons with rent to pay and an income of less than six dol-
lars a week."

And yet she was better off in point of pay than this
Sixth Street mother, who " had just brought home four
pairs of pants to finish, at seven cents a pair. She was
required to put the canvas in the bottom, basting and sew-
ing three times around ; to put the linings in the waist-
bands ; to tack three pockets, three corners to each ; to
put on two stays and eight buttons, and make six button-
holes ; to put the buckle on the back strap and sew on the
ticket, all for seven cents." Better off than the " church-
going mother of six children," and with a husband sick to
death, who to support the family made shirts, averaging
an income of one dollar and twenty cents a week, while
her oldest girl, aged thirteen, was " employed down-town
cutting out Hamburg edgings at one dollar and a half a
week — two and a half cents per hour for ten hours of
steady labor — making the total income of the family two
dollars and seventy cents per week." Than the Harlem
woman, who was " making a brave effort to support a

174 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

sick husband and two children by taking in washing at
thirty-five cents for the lot of fourteen large pieces, find-
ing coal, soap, starch, and bluing herself, rather than de-
pend on charity in any form." Specimen wages of the
tenements these, seemingly inconsistent with the charge
of improvidence.

But the connection on second thought is not obscure.
There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing
battle for the bare necessaries of life, to encourage looking
ahead, everything to discourage the effort. Improvidence
and wastefulness are natural results. The instalment
plan secures to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth
his few comforts ; the evil day of reckoning is put off till
a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come,
with failure to pay and the loss of hard-earned dollars, it
simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the
cradle by such incidents. The children soon catch the
spirit of this sort of thing. I remember once calling at
the home of a poor washer- woman, living in an East Side
tenement, and finding the door locked. Some children in
the hallway stopped their play and eyed me attentively
while I knocked. The biggest girl volunteered the infor-
mation that Mrs. Smith was out ; but while I was think-
ing of how I wTas to get a message to her, the child put a
question of her own : " Are you the spring man or the
clock man ? " When I assured her that I was neither one
nor the other, but had brought work for her mother, Mrs.
Smith, who had been hiding from the instalment collector,
speedily appeared.

Perhaps of all the disheartening experiences of those
who have devoted lives of unselfish thought and effort,
and their number is not so small as often supposed, to the
lifting of this great load, the indifference of those they

THE COMMON HERD.

175

would help is the most puzzling. They will not be helped.
Dragged by main force out of their misery, they slip back
again on the first opportunity, seemingly content only in
the old rut. The explanation was supplied by two women
of my acquaintance in an Elizabeth Street tenement,
whom the city missionaries had taken from their wretched
hovel and provided with work and a decent home some-
where in New Jersey. In three weeks they were back,
saying that they preferred their dark rear room to the
stumps out in the country. But to me the oldest, the
mother, who had struggled along with her daughter mak-
ing cloaks at half a dollar apiece, twelve long years since
the daughters husband was killed in a street accident and
the city took the children, made the bitter confession :
" AVe do get so kind o' downhearted living this way, that
we have to be where something is going on, or we just
can't stand it." And there was sadder pathos to me in
her words than in the whole long story of their struggle
with poverty ; for unconsciously she voiced the sufferings
of thousands, misjudged by a happier world, deemed vi-
cious because they are human and unfortunate.

It is a popular delusion, encouraged by all sorts of exag-
gerated stories when nothing more exciting demands pub-
lic attention, that there are more evictions in the tene-
ments of New York every year " than in all Ireland." I
am not sure that it is doing much for the tenant to upset
this fallacy. To my mind, to be put out of a tenement
would be the height of good luck. The fact is, however,
that evictions are not nearly as common in New York as
supposed. The reason is that in the civil courts, the judges
of which are elected in their districts, the tenant-voter has
solid ground to stand upon at last. The law that takes his
side to start with is usually twisted to the utmost to give

176

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

him time and save him expense. In the busiest East Side
court, that has been very appropriately duhbed the " Poor
Man's Court," fully five thousand dispossess warrants are
issued in a year, but probably not fifty evictions take
place in the district. The landlord has only one vote,
while there may be forty voters hiring his rooms in the
house, all of which the judge takes into careful account as

elements that have a direct bearing on the case. And so
they have — on his case. There are sad cases, just as there
are " rounders " who prefer to be moved at the landlord's
expense and save the rent, but the former at least are un-
usual enough to attract more than their share of attention.

If his very poverty compels the tenant to live at a rate
if not in a style that would beggar a Vanderbilt, paving
four prices for everything he needs, from his rent and

THE COMMON HEED.

177

coal down to the smallest item in his housekeeping ac-
count, fashion, no less inexorable in the tenements than on
the avenue, exacts of him that he must die in a style that
is finally and utterly ruinous. The habit of expensive
funerals — 1 know of no better classification for it than
along with the opium habit and similar grievous plagues
of mankind — is a distinctively Irish inheritance, but it has
taken root among all classes of tenement dwellers, curious-
ly enough most firmly among the Italians, who have taken
amazingly to the funeral coach, perhaps because it fur-
nishes the one opportunity of their lives for a really grand
turn-out with a free ride thrown in. It is not at all un-
common to find the hoards of a whole lifetime of hard
work and self denial squandered on the empty show of a
ludicrous funeral parade and a display of flowers that ill
comports with the humble life it is supposed to exalt. It
is easier to understand the wake as a sort of consolation
cup for the survivors for whom there is — as one of them,
doubtless a heathenish pessimist, put it to me once — '* no
such luck." The press and the pulpit have denounced
the wasteful practice that often entails bitter want upon
the relatives of the one buried with such pomp, but
with little or no apparent result. Rather, the undertaker's
business prospers more than ever in the tenements since
the genius of politics has seen its way clear to make capi-
tal out of the dead voter as well as of the living, by
making him the means of a useful "show of strength"
and count of noses.

One free excursion awaits young and old whom bitter
poverty has denied the poor privilege of the choice of the
home in death they were denied in life, the ride up the
Sound to the Potter's Field, charitably styled the City
Cemetery. But even there they do not escape their fate.
12

178

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

In the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they
lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowd-
ed in death as they were in life, to " save space ; " for
even on that desert island the ground is not for the exclu-
sive possession of those who cannot afford to pay for it.
There is an odd coincidence in this, that year by year the
lives that are begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs
whom the police pick up and the city adopts as its wards,
are balanced by the even more forlorn lives that are ended
in the river. I do not know how or why it happens, or
that it is more than a mere coincidence. But there it is.
Year by year the balance is struck — a few more, a few less
— substantially the same when the record is closed.

THE TRENCH IN THE POTTER'S FIELD.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN.

THE problem of the children becomes, in these swarms,
to the last degree perplexing. Their very number
make one stand aghast. I have already given instances of
the packing of the child population in East Side tenements.
They might be continued indefinitely until the array would
be enough to startle any community. For, be it remem-
bered, these children with the training they receive — or
do not receive — with the instincts they inherit and absorb
in their growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our
theory of government is worth anything. More than a
working majority of our voters now register from the
tenements. I counted the other day the little ones, up to
ten years or so, in a Bayard Street tenement that for a
yard has a triangular space in the centre with sides four-
teen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a row of
ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hy-
drant at the apex. There was about as much light in this
" yard " as in the average cellar. I gave up my self-im-
posed task in despair when I had counted one hundred
and twenty-eight in forty families. Thirteen I had
missed, or not found in. Applying the average for the
forty to the whole fifty-three, the house contained one
hundred and seventy children. It is not the only time I
have had to give up such census work. I have in mind
an alley — an inlet rather to a row of rear tenements — that

180

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the
crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I
tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could
not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just
how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children
turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one
seems to know anything about. When last spring some
workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River
pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad
crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his
parents afterward turned up. The truant officer assuredly
does not know, though he spends his life trying to find
out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department
that employs him admits that thousands of poor children
are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of
room. There was a big tenement in the Sixth Ward, now
happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business
that blots out so many foul spots in New York — it figured
not long ago in the official reports as " an out-and-out hog-
pe7i " — that had a record of one hundred and two arrests
in four years among its four hundred and seventy-eight
tenants, fifty-seven of them for drunken and disorderly
conduct. I do not know how many children there were
in it, but the inspector reported that he found only seven
in the whole house who owned that they went to school.
The rest gathered all the instruction they received run-
ning for beer for their elders. Some of them claimed the
" flat " as their home as a mere matter of form. They
slept in the streets at night. The official came upon a
little party of four drinking beer out of the cover of a
milk-can in the hallway. They were of the seven good
boys and proved their claim to the title by offering him
some.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN.

181

The old question, what to do with the boy, assumes a
new and serious phase in the tenements. Under the best
conditions found there, it is not easily answered. In nine
cases out of ten lie would make an excellent mechanic, if
trained early to work at a trade, for he is neither dull nor
slow, but the short-sighted despotism of the trades unions
lias practically closed that avenue to him. Trade-schools,
however excellent, cannot supply the opportunity thus
denied him, and at the outset the boy stands condemned
by his own to low and ill-paid drudgery, held down by
the hand that of all should labor to raise him. Home,
the greatest factor of all in the training of the young, means
nothing to him but a pigeon-hole in a coop along with so
many other human animals. Its influence is scarcely of
the elevating kind, if it have any. The very games at
which he takes a hand in the street become polluting in
its atmosphere. With no steady hand to guide him, the
boy takes naturally to idle ways. Caught in the street
by the truant officer, or by the agents of the Children's
Societies, peddling, perhaps, or begging, to help out the
family resources, he runs the risk of being sent to a re-
formatory, where contact with vicious boys older than him-
self soon develop the latent possibilities for evil that lie
hidden in him. The city has no Truant Home in which
to keep him, and all efforts of the children's friends to en-
force school attendance are paralyzed by this want. The
risk of the reformatory is too great. What is done in
the end is to let him take chances — with the chances all
against him. The result is the rough young savage, fa-
miliar from the street. Rough as he is, if any one doubt
that this child of common clay have in him the instinct
of beauty, of love for the ideal of which his life has no
embodiment, let him put the matter to the test. Let

182

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

him take into a tenement block a handful of flowers
from the fields and watch the brightened faces, the sod-
den abandonment of play and fight that go ever hand in
hand where there is no elbow-room, the wild entreaty for
" posies," the eager love with which the little messengers
of peace are shielded, once possessed ; then let him change
his mind. I have seen an armful of daisies keep the
peace of a block better than a policeman and his club,
seen instincts awaken under their gentle appeal, whose
very existence the soil in which they grew made seem a
mockery. I have not forgotten the deputation of raga-
muffins from a Mulberry Street alley that knocked at my
office door one morning on a mysterious expedition for
flowers, not for themselves, but for " a lady," and having
obtained what they wanted, trooped off to bestow them, a
ragged and dirty little band, with a solemnity that was
quite unusual. It was not until an old man called the
next day to thank me for the flowers that I found out
they had decked the bier of a pauper, in the dark rear
room where she lay waiting in her pine-board coffin for
the city's hearse. Yet, as I knew, that dismal alley with
its bare brick walls, between which no sun ever rose or
set, was the world of those children. It filled their young
lives. Probably not one of them had ever been out of the
sight of it. They were too dirty, too ragged, and too gen-
erally disreputable, too well hidden in their slum besides,
to come into line with the Fresh Air summer boarders.

With such human instincts and cravings, forever unsat-
isfied, turned into a haunting curse ; with appetite ground
to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the chil-
dren of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of
wearisome toil that claims them at an age when the play
of their happier fellows has but just begun. Has a yard

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN.

183

of turf been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within
their reach, they are banished and barred out from it
as from a heaven that is not for such as they. I came
upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a
while ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson
in " writin'." And this is what they wrote: "Keeb of
te Grass.'' They had it by heart, for there was not, I
verily believe, a green sod within a quarter of a mile.
Home to them is an empty name. Pleasure ? A gentle-
man once catechized a ragged class in a down-town public
school on this point, and recorded the result : Out of for-
ty-eight boys twenty had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge
that was scarcely five minutes' walk away, three only had
been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride
in a horse-car. The street, with its ash-barrels and its
dirt, the river that runs foul with mud, are their domain.
What training they receive is picked up there. And they
are apt pupils. If the mud and the dirt are easily re-
flected in their lives, what wonder? Scarce half-grown,
such lads as these confront the world with the challenge

to give them their due, too long withheld, or . Our

jails supply the answer to the alternative.

A little fellow who seemed clad in but a single rag was
among the flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Head-
quarters one day last summer. Xo one knew where he
came from or where he belonged. The bov himself knew
as little about it as anybody, and was the least anxious to
have light shed on the subject after he had spent a night
in the matron's nursery. The discovery that beds were
provided for boys to sleep in there, and that he could have
" a whole egg " and three slices of bread for breakfast put
him on the best of terms with the world in general, and
he decided that Headquarters was " a bully place." He

184

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES,

sang "McGinty " all through, with Tenth Avenue varia-
tions, for the police, and then settled down to the serious
business of giving an account of himself. The examina-
tion went on after this fashion :

" Where do you go to church, my boy ? "

" We don't have no clothes to go to church." And in-
deed his appearance, as he was, in the door of any Kew
York church would have caused a sensation.

" "Well, where do you go to school, then ? "

"I don't go to school," with a snort of contempt.

" Where do you buy your bread ? "

" We don't buy no bread ; we buy beer," said the boy, and
it was eventually the saloon that led the police as a land-
mark to his " home." It was worthy of the boy. As he
had said, his only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the
floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing else.

Into the rooms of the Children's Aid Society were led
two little girls whose father had " busted up the house "
and put them on the street after their mother died. An-
other, who was turned out by her step-mother " because
she had five of her own and could not afford to keep her,"
could not remember ever having been in church or Sun-
day-school, and only knew the name of Jesus through
hearing people swear by it. She had no idea what they
meant. These were specimens of the overflow from the
tenements of our home-heathen that are growing up in
Kew York's streets to-day, while tender-hearted men and
women are busying themselves with the socks and the
hereafter of well-fed little Hottentots thousands of miles
away. According to Canon Taylor, of York, one hun-
dred and nine missionaries in the four fields of Persia,
Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt spent one year and sixty
thousand dollars in converting one little heathen girl. If

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN. 1S5

there is nothing the matter with those missionaries, they
might come to Xew York with a good deal better pros-
pect of success.

By those who lay flattering unction to their souls in
the knowledge that to-day New York has, at all events, no
brood of the gutters of tender years that can be homeless
long unheeded, let it be remembered well through what
effort this judgment has been averted. In thirty-seven
years the Children's Aid Society, that came into existence
as an emphatic protest against the tenement corruption of
the young, has sheltered quite three hundred thousand
outcast, homeless, and orphaned children in its lodging-
houses, and has found homes in the AVest for seventy
thousand that had none. Doubtless, as a mere stroke of
finance, the five millions and a half thus spent were a
wiser investment than to have let them grow up thieves
and thugs. In the last fifteen years of this tireless battle
for the safety of the State the intervention of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has been in-
voked for 13S,S91 little ones : it has thrown its protection
around more than twenty-five thousand helpless children,
and has convicted nearly sixteen thousand wretches of
child-beating and abuse. Add to this the standing army
of fifteen thousand dependent children in Xew York's
asylums and institutions, and some idea is gained of the
crop that is garnered day by day in the tenements, of the
enormous force employed to check their inroads on our
social life, and of the cause for apprehension that would
exist did their efforts flag for ever so brief a time.

Nothing is now better understood than that the rescue
of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty,
as presented for our solution to-day ; that character may
be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless task.

186

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The concurrent testimony of all who have to undertake it
at a later stage : that the young are naturally neither vi-
cious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except
by the bad influences of the street, makes this duty all the
more urgent as well as hopeful. Helping hands are held
out on every side. To private charity the municipality
leaves the entire care of its proletariat of tender years,
lulling its conscience to sleep with liberal appropriations
of money to foot the bills. Indeed, it is held by those
whose opinions are entitled to weight that it is far too
liberal a paymaster for its own best interests and those of
its wards. It deals with the evil in the seed to a limited
extent in gathering in the outcast babies from the streets.
To the ripe fruit the gates of its prisons, its reformatories,
and its workhouses are opened wide the year round.
What the showing would be at this end of the line were it
not for the barriers wise charity has thrown across the
broad highway to ruin — is building day by day — may be
measured by such results as those quoted above in the
span of a single life.

CHAPTER XVI.

WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS.

FIRST among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum.
It stands at the very outset of the waste of life that
goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people ;
powerless to prevent it, though it gather in the outcasts
by night and by day. In a score of years an army of
twenty-five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried
out from the streets of New York in arraignment of a
Christian civilization under the blessings of which the in-
stinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and
want. Only the poor abandon their children. The sto-
ries of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the
newspapers at intervals are pure fiction. Not one in-
stance of even a well-dressed infant having been picked up
in the streets is on record. They come in rags, a news-
paper often the only wrap, semi-occasionally one in a clean
slip with some evidence of loving care ; a little slip of
paper pinned on, perhaps, with some such message as this
I once read, in a woman's trembling hand : " Take care of
Johnny, for God's sake. I cannot." But even that is
the rarest of all happenings.

The city divides with the Sisters of Charity the task of
gathering them in. The real foundlings, the children of
the gutter that are picked up by the police, are the city's
wards. In midwinter, when the poor shiver in their
homes, and in the dog-days when the fierce heat and foul

188

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

air of the tenements smother their babies by thousands,
they are found, sometimes three and four in a night,
in hallways, in areas and on the doorsteps of the rich,
with whose comfort in luxurious homes the wretched
mother somehow connects her own misery. Perhaps, as
the drowning man clutches at a straw, she hopes that
these happier hearts may have love to spare even for her
little one. In this she is mistaken. Unauthorized babies
especially are not popular in the abodes of the wealthy.
It never happens outside of the story-books that a baby
so deserted finds home and friends at once. Its career,
though rather more official, is less romantic, and gener-
ally brief. After a night spent at Police Headquarters it
travels up to the Infants' Hospital on Randall's Island in
the morning, fitted out with a number and a bottle, that
seldom see much wear before they are laid aside for a fresh
recruit. Few outcast babies survive their desertion long.
Murder is the true name of the mother's crime in eight
cases out of ten. Of 508 babies received at the Randall's
Island Hospital last year 333 died, 65.55 per cent. But
of the 508 only 170 were picked up in the streets, and
among these the mortality was much greater, probably
nearer ninety per cent., if the truth were told. The rest
were born in the hospitals. The high mortality among
the foundlings is not to be marvelled at. The wonder is,
rather, that any survive. The stormier the night, the more
certain is the police nursery to echo with the feeble cries
of abandoned babes. Often they come half dead from
exposure. One live baby came in a little pine coffin which
a policeman found an inhuman wretch trying to bury in
an up-town lot. But many do not live to be officially
registered as a charge upon the county. Seventy-two
dead babies were picked up in the streets last year. Some

WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS.

189

of them were doubtless put out by very poor parents to
save funeral expenses. In hard times the number of dead
and live foundlings always increases very noticeably. But
whether travelling by way of the Morgue or the Infants'
Hospital, the little army of waifs meets, reunited soon, in
the trench in the Potter's Field where, if no medical stu-
dent is in need of a subject, they are laid in squads of a
dozen.

Most of the foundlings come from the East Side, where
they are left by young mothers without wedding-rings
or other name than their own to bestow upon the baby,
returning from the island hospital to face an unpitying
world with the evidence of their shame. Kot infrequently
they wear the bed-tick regimentals of the Public Charities,
and thus their origin is easily enough traced. Oftener no
ray of light penetrates the gloom, and no effort is made to
probe the mystery of sin and sorrow. This also is the
policy pursued in the great Foundling Asylum of the
Sisters of Charity in Sixty-eighth Street, known all over
the world as Sister Irene's Asylum. Years ago the crib
that now stands just inside the street door, under the
great main portal, was placed outside at night ; but it
filled up too rapidly. The babies took to coming in little
squads instead of in single file, and in self-defence the
sisters were forced to take the cradle in. Xow the mother
must bring her child inside and put it in the crib where
she is seen by the sister on guard. Iso effort is made to
question her, or discover the child's antecedents, but she
is asked to stay and nurse her own and another baby.
If she refuses, she is allowed to depart unhindered. If
willing, she enters at once into the great family of the
good Sister who in twenty-one years has gathered as many
thousand homeless babies into her fold. One was brought

190

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

in when I was last in the asylum, in the middle of July,
that received in its crib the number 20715. The death-
rate is of course lowered a good deal where exposure of
the child is prevented. Among the eleven hundred in-
fants in the asylum it was something over nineteen per
cent, last year ; but among those actually received in the
twelvemonth nearer twice that figure. Even the nineteen
per cent., remarkably low for a Foundling Asylum, was
equal to the startling death-rate of Gotham Court in the
cholera scourge.

Four hundred and sixty mothers, who could not or
would not keep their own babies, did voluntary penance
for their sin in the asylum last year by nursing a strange
waif besides their own until both should be strong enough
to take their chances in life's battle. An even larger num-
ber than the eleven hundred were " pay babies," put out
to be nursed by " mothers " outside the asylum. The
money thus earned pays the rent of hundreds of poor
families. It is no trifle, quite half of the quarter of a
million dollars contributed annually by the city for the
support of the asylum. The procession of these nurse-
mothers, when they come to the asylum on the first
Wednesday of each month to receive their pay and have
the babies inspected by the sisters, is one of the sights of
the city. The nurses, who are under strict supervision,
grow to love their little charges and part from them with
tears when, at the age of four or five, they are sent to
Western homes to be adopted. The sisters carefully en-
courage the home-feeling in the child as their strongest
ally in seeking its mental and moral elevation, and the tod-
dlers depart happy to join their " papas and mammas 99 in
the far-away, unknown home.

An infinitely more fiendish, if to surface appearances

WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS.

191

less deliberate, plan of child-murder than desertion has
flourished in New York for years under the title of baby-
farming. The name, put into plain English, means starv-
ing babies to death. The law has fought this most hein-
ous of crimes by compelling the registry of all baby-farms.
As well might it require all persons intending murder to
register their purpose with time and place of the deed un-
der the penalty of exemplary fines. Murderers do not
hang out a shingle. " Baby-farms," said once Mr. El-
bridge T. Gerry, the President of the Society charged with
the execution of the law that was passed through his
efforts, " are concerns by means of which persons, usually
of disreputable character, eke out a living by taking two,
or three, or four babies to board. They are the charges
of outcasts, or illegitimate children. They feed them on
sour milk, and give them paregoric to keep them quiet,
until they die, when they get some young medical man
without experience to sign a certificate to the Board of
Health that the child died of inanition, and so the matter
ends. The baby is dead, and there is no one to com-
plain." A handful of baby-farms have been registered
and licensed by the Board of Health with the approval of
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in
the last five years, but none of this kind. The devil keeps
the only complete register to be found anywhere. Their
trace is found oftenest by the coroner or the police ;
sometimes they may be discovered hiding in the advertis-
ing columns of certain newspapers, under the guise of the
scarcely less heartless traffic in helpless children that is
dignified with the pretence of adoption — for cash. An
idea of how this scheme works was obtained through the
disclosures in a celebrated divorce case, a year or two
ago. The society has among its records a very recent

192

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

case * of a baby a week old (Baby " Blue Eyes ") that was
offered for sale — adoption, the dealer called it — in a news-
paper. The agent bought it after some haggling for a
dollar, and arrested the woman slave-trader ; but the law
was powerless to punish her for her crime. Twelve un-
fortunate women awaiting dishonored motherhood were
found in her house.

One gets a glimpse of the frightful depths to which
human nature, perverted by avarice bred of ignorance and
rasping poverty, can descend, in the mere suggestion of
systematic insurance for profit of children's lives. A
woman was put on trial in this city last year for incredible
cruelty in her treatment of a step-child. The evidence
aroused a strong suspicion that a pitifully small amount
of insurance on the child's life was one of the motives for
the woman's savagery. A little investigation brought out
the fact that three companies that were in the business of
insuring children's lives, for sums varying from $17 up,
had issued not less than a million such policies ! The
premiums ranged from five to twenty-five cents a week.
What untold horrors this business may conceal was sug-
gested by a formal agreement entered into by some of the
companies, a for the purpose of preventing speculation in
the insurance of children's lives." By the terms of this
compact, " no higher premium than ten cents could be ac-
cepted on children under six years old." Barbarism for-
sooth ! Did ever heathen cruelty invent a more fiendish
plot than the one written down between the lines of this
legal paper?

It is with a sense of glad relief that one turns from this
misery to the brighter page of the helping hands stretched

* Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Case 42,028, May
16, 1889. "

WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS.

193

forth on every side to save the young and the helpless.
New York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in
the world. Xowhere is there so eager a readiness to help,
when it is known that help is worthily wanted ; nowhere
are such armies of devoted workers, nowhere such abun-
dance of means ready to the hand of those who know the
need and how rightly to supply it. Its poverty, its slums,
and its suffering are the result of unprecedented growth
with the consequent disorder and crowding, and the com-
mon penalty of metropolitan greatness. If the structure
shows signs of being top-heavy, evidences are not wanting
— they are multiplying day by day — that patient toilers
are at work among the underpinnings. The Day Nur-
series, the numberless Kindergartens and charitable schools
in the poor quarters, the Fresh Air Funds, the thousand
and one charities that in one way or another reach the
homes and the lives of the poor with sweetening touch, are
proof that if much is yet to be done, if the need only
grows with the effort, hearts and hands will be found to
do it in ever-increasing measure. Black as the cloud is
it has a silver lining, bright with promise. New York is
to-day a hundredfold cleaner, better, purer, city than it
was even ten years ago.

Two powerful agents that were among the pioneers in
this work of moral and physical regeneration stand in
Paradise Park to-day as milestones on the rocky, uphill
road. The handful of noble women, who braved the foul
depravity of the Old Brewery to rescue its child victims,
rolled away the first and heaviest bowlder, which legisla-
tures and city councils had tackled in vain. The Five
Points Mission and the Five Points House of Industry
have accomplished what no machinery of government
availed to do. Sixty thousand children have been res-
13

194

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

cued by them from the streets and had their little feet set
in the better way. Their work still goes on, increasing
and gathering in the waifs, instructing and feeding them,
and helping their parents with advice and more substan-
tial aid. Their charity knows not creed or nationality.
The House of Industry is an enormous nursery-school
with an average of more than four hundred day scholars
and constant boarders — "outsiders " and " insiders." Its
influence is felt for many blocks around in that crowded
part of the city. It is one of the most touching sights in
the world to see a score of babies, rescued from homes of
brutality and desolation, where no other blessing than a
drunken curse was ever heard, saying their prayers in the
nursery at bedtime. Too often their white night-gowns
hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly bruised by in-
human hands. In the shelter of this fold they are safe,
and a happier little group one may seek long and far in
vain.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE STREET ARAB.

"XTOT all the barriers erected by society against its
nether life, not the labor of unnumbered societies
for the rescue and relief of its outcast waifs, can dam the
stream of homelessness that issues from a source where
the very name of home is a mockery. The Street Arab
is as much of an institution in New York as Newspaper
How, to which he gravitates naturally, following his Bo-
hemian instinct. Crowded out of the tenements to shift
for himself, and quite ready to do it, he meets there the
host of adventurous runaways from every State in the
Union and from across the sea, whom New York attracts
with a queer fascination, as it attracts the older emigrants
from all parts of the world. A census of the population
in the Newsboys' Lodging-house on any night will show
such an odd mixture of small humanity as could hardly be
got together in any other spot. It is a mistake to think
that they are helpless little creatures, to be pitied and cried
over because they are alone in the world. The unmerciful
" guying" the good man would receive, who went to them
with such a programme, would soon convince him that
that sort of pity was wasted, and would very likely give
him the idea that they were a set of hardened little scoun-
drels, quite beyond the reach of missionary effort.

But that would only be his second mistake. The Street
Arab has all the faults and all the virtues of the lawless-

THE STREET ARAB.

197

life he leads. Vagabond that he is, acknowledging no
authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything,
with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries
to coerce him, he is as bright and sharp as the weasel,
which, among all the predatory beasts, he most resembles.
His sturdy independence, love of freedom and absolute
self-reliance, together with his rude sense of justice that
enables him to govern his little community, not always in
accordance with municipal law or city ordinances, but often
a good deal closer to the saving line of " doing to others
as one would be done by " — these are strong handles by
which those who know how can catch the boy and make
him useful. Successful bankers, clergymen, and lawyers
all over the country, statesmen in some instances of na-
tional repute, bear evidence in their lives to the potency
of such missionary efforts. There is scarcely a learned
profession, or branch of honorable business, that has not
in the last twenty years borrowed some of its brightest
light from the poverty and gloom of New York's streets.

Anyone, whom business or curiosity has taken through
Park Row or across Printing House Square in the mid-
night hour, when the ail* is filled with the roar of great
presses spinning with printers' ink on endless rolls of white
paper the history of the world in the twenty-four hours
that have just passed away, has seen little groups of these
boys hanging about the newspaper offices ; in winter,
when snow is on the streets, fighting for warm spots
around the grated vent-holes that let out the heat and
steam from the underground press-rooms with their noise
and clatter, and in summer playing craps and 7-11 on the
curb for their hard-earned pennies, with all the absorbing
concern of hardened gamblers. This is their beat. Here
the agent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

198

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Children finds those he thinks too young for " business,"
but does not always capture them. Like rabbits in their
burrows, the little ragamuffins sleep with at least one eye
open, and every sense alert to the approach of danger : of
their enemy, the policeman, whose chief business in life
is to move them on, and of the agent bent on robbing
them of their cherished freedom. At the first warning
shout they scatter and are off. To pursue them would be
like chasing the fleet-footed mountain goat in his rocky
fastnesses. There is not an open "door, a hidden turn or
runway which they do not know, with lots of secret pas-
sages and short cuts no one else ever found. To steal a
march on them is the only way. There is a coal chute
from the sidewalk to the boiler-room in the sub-cellar of
the Post Office which the Society's officer found the boys
had made into a sort of toboggan slide to a snug berth in
wintry weather. They used to slyly raise the cover in the
street, slide down in single file, and snuggle up to the
warm boiler out of harm's way, as they thought. It
proved a trap, however. The agent slid down himself
one cold night — there was no other way of getting there
— and, landing right in the midst of the sleeping colony,
had it at his mercy. After repeated raids upon their
headquarters, the boys forsook it last summer, and were
next found herding under the shore-end of one of the
East Biver banana docks, where they had fitted up a reg-
ular club-room that was shared by thirty or forty home-
less boys and about a million rats.

Newspaper Row is merely their headquarters. They
are to be found ail over the city, these Street Arabs,
where the neighborhood offers a chance of picking up a
living in the daytime and of " turning in " at night with
a promise of security from surprise. In warm weather a

THE STREET ARAB.

199

truck in the street, a convenient out-house, or a dug-out
in a hay-barge at the wharf make good bunks. Two were
found making their nest once in the end of a big iron pipe
up by the Harlem Bridge, and an old boiler at the East
River served as an elegant flat for another couple, who
kept house there with a thief the police had long sought,
little suspecting that he was hiding under their very noses
for months together. When the Children's Aid Society
first opened its lodging-houses, and with some difficulty
persuaded the boys that their charity was no " pious
dodge" to trap them into a treasonable "Sunday-school
racket," its managers overheard a laughable discussion
among the boys in their unwontedly comfortable beds —
perhaps the first some of them had ever slept in — as to
the relative merits of the different styles of their every-
day berths. Preferences were divided between the steam-
grating and a sand-box; but the weight of the evidence
was decided to be in favor of the sand-box, because, as its
advocate put it, "you could curl all up in it." The new
" find " was voted a good way ahead of any previous ex-
perience, however. "My eyes, ain't it nice I" said one of
the lads, tucked in under his blanket up to the chin, and
the roomful of boys echoed the sentiment. The com-
pact silently made that night between the Street Arabs
and their hosts has never been broken. They have been
fast friends ever since.

Whence this army of homeless boys ? is a question
often asked. The answer is supplied by the procession of
mothers that go out and in at Police Headquarters the
year round, inquiring for missing boys, often not until
they have been gone for weeks and months, and then
sometimes rather as a matter of decent form than from
any real interest in the lad's fate. The stereotyped prom-

200

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ise of tlie clerks who fail to find Iris name on the books
among the arrests, that he " will come back when he gets
hungry," does not always come true. More likely he
went away because he was hungry. Some are orphans,
actually or in effect, thrown upon the world when their
parents were " sent up " to the island or to Sing Sing,

and Willie, aged ten and eight, picked up by the police.
They " didn't live nowhere," never went to school, could
neither read nor write. Their twelve-year-old sister kept
house for the father, who turned the boys out to beg, or
steal, or starve. Grinding poverty and hard work beyond
the years of Lhe lad ; blows and curses for breakfast, din-
ner, and supper ; all these are recruiting agents for the
homeless army. Sickness in the house, too many mouths
to feed :

" DIDN'T LIVE NOWHERE."

and somehow over-
looked by the
"Society," which
thenc ef orth be-
came the enemy to
be shunned until
growth and dirt
and the hardships
of the street, that
make old early, of-
fer some hope of
successfully float-
ing the lie that
they are "sixteen."
A drunken father
explains the mat-
ter in other cases,
as in that of John

THE STREET ARAB.

201

" "We wnz six," said an urchin of twelve or thirteen I
came across in the Xewsboys' Lodging House, " and we
ain't got no father. Some on us had to go." And so he
went, to make a living by blacking boots. The going is
easy enough. There is very little to hold the boy who
has never known anything but a home in a tenement.
Very soon the wild life in the streets holds him fast, and
thenceforward by his own effort there is no escape. Left
alone to himself, he soon enough finds a place in the police
books, and there would be no other answer to the second
question : " what becomes of the boy ? " than that given
by the criminal courts every day in the week.

But he is not left alone. Society in our day has no such
suicidal intention. Right here, at the parting of the ways,
it has thrown up the strongest of all its defences for itself
and for the boy. "What the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children is to the baby- waif, the Children's
Aid Society is to the homeless boy at this real turning-
point in his career. The good it has done cannot easily
be over-estimated. Its lodging-houses, its schools and its
homes block every avenue of escape with their offer of
shelter upon terms which the boy soon accepts, as on the
whole cheap and fair. In the great Duane Street lodging-
house for newsboys, they are succinctly stated in a " no-
tice " over the door that reads thus : " Boys who swear and
chew tobacco cannot sleep here." There is another un-
written condition, viz.: that the boy shall be really without
a home ; but upon this the managers wisely do not insist
too obstinately, accepting without too close inquiry his
account of himself where that seems advisable, well
knowing that many a home that sends forth such lads far
less deserves the name than the one they are able to give
them.

202

HOW THE OTIIEli HALF LIVES.

With these simple preliminaries the outcast boy may
enter. Rags do not count ; to ignorance the door is only
opened wider. Dirt does not survive long, once within
the walls of the lodging-house. It is the settled belief of

the men who
conduct them

jU5 ' , that soap and

water are as
powerful moral
agents in their
particular field
as preachi n g ,
and they have
experience to
back them.

The boy
may come ,
and go as he
pleases, so
long as he 4
behaves
himself. No
restraint of
any sort is
put on his in-
dependence.

He is as freo as any other guest at a hotel, and, like
him, he is expected to pay for what he gets. How
wisely the men planned who laid the foundation of this
great rescue work and yet carry it on, is shown by no sin-

STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS.

THE STREET ARAB.

203

gle feature of it better than by this. Ko pauper was ever
bred within these houses. Xothing would have been
easier with such material, or more fatal. But charily of
the kind that pauperizes is furthest from their scheme.
Self-help is its very key-note, and it strikes a response in
the boy's sturdiest trait that raises him at once to a level
with the effort made in his behalf. Recognized as an in-
dependent trader, capable of and bound to take care of
himself, he is in a position to ask trust if trade has gone
against him and he cannot pay cash for his " grub " and
his bed, and to get it without question. He can even
have the loan of the small capital required to start him in
business with a boot-black's kit, or an armful of papers, if
he is known or vouched for ; but every cent is charged to
him as carefully as though the transaction involved as
many hundreds of dollars, and he is expected to pay back
the money as soon as he has made enough to keep him
going without it. lie very rarely betrays the trust re-
posed in him. Quite on the contrary, around this sound
core of self-help, thus encouraged, habits of thrift and
ambitious industry are seen to grow up in a majority of
instances. The boy is "growing" a character, and he
goes out to the man's work in life with that which for him
is better than if he had found a fortune.

Six cents for his bed, six for his breakfast of bread and
coffee, and six for his supper of pork and beans, as much
as he can eat, are the rates of the boys' " hotel " for those
who bunk together in the great dormitories that some-
times hold more than a hundred berths, two tiers high,
made of iron, clean and neat. For the " upper ten," the
young financiers who early take the lead among their fel-
lows, hire them to work for wages and add a share of
their profits to their own, and for the lads who are learn-

204

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ing a trade and getting paid by the week, there are ten-
cent beds with a locker and with curtains hung about.
Night schools and Sunday night meetings are held in the
building and are always well attended, in winter especi-
ally, when the lodging-houses are crowded. In summer
the tow-path and the country attract their share of the
bigger boys. The " Sunday-school racket " has ceased to
have terror for them. They follow the proceedings with
the liveliest interest, quick to detect cant of any sort,
should any stray in. Xo one has any just conception of
what congregational singing is until he has witnessed a
roomful of these boys roll up their sleeves and start in
on " I am a lily of the valley." The swinging trapeze in
the gymnasium on the top floor is scarcely more popular
with the boys than this tremendously vocal worship. The
Street Arab puts his whole little soul into what interests
him for the moment, whether it be pulverizing a rival
who has done a mean trick to a smaller boy, or attending
at the "gospel shop" on Sundays. This characteristic
made necessary some extra supervision when recently
the lads in the Duane Street Lodging House "chipped
in " and bought a set of boxing gloves. The trapeze
suffered a temporary eclipse until this new toy had been
tested to the extent of several miniature black eyes
upon which soap had no effect, and sundry little scores
had been settled that evened things up, as it were, for a
fresh start.

I tried one night, not with the best of success I con-
fess, to photograph the boys in their wash-room, while
they were cleanmg up for supper. They were quite tur-
bulent, to the disgust of one of their number who assumed,
unasked, the office of general manager of the show, and
expressed his mortification to me in very polite language.

206

HOW THE OTHER HALE LIVES.

" If they would only behave, sir ! " lie complained, "you
could make a good picture."

" Yes," I said, " but it isn't in them, I suppose."

" No, b'gosh ! " said he, lapsing suddenly from grace
under the provocation, " them kids ain't got no sense,
nohow ! "

The Society maintains five of these boys' lodging houses,
and one for girls, in the city. The Duane Street Lodging
House alone has sheltered since its foundation in 1855
nearly a quarter of a million different boys, at a total ex-
pense of a good deal less than half a million dollars. Of
this amount, up to the beginning of the present year, the
boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less
than $172,776.38. In all of the lodging-houses together,
12,153 boys and girls were sheltered and taught last year.
The boys saved up no inconsiderable amount of money in
the savings banks provided for them in the houses, a sim-
ple system of lock-boxes that are emptied for their benefit
once a month. Besides these, the Society has established
and operates in the tenement districts twenty-one indus-
trial schools, co-ordinate with the public schools in author-
ity, for the children of the poor who cannot find room
in the city's school-houses, or are too ragged to go there ;
two free roading-rooms, a dressmaking and typewriting
school and a laundry for the instruction of girls ; a sick-
children's mission in the city and two on the sea-shore,
where poor mothers may take their babies ; a- cottage by
the sea for crippled girls, and a brush factory for crippled
boys in Forty-fourth Street. The Italian school in Leonard
Street, alone, had an average attendance of over six hun-
dred pupils last year. The daily average attendance at all
of them was 4,105, while 11,331 children were registered
and taught. When the fact that there were among these

THE STREET ARAB.

207

1,132 children of drunken parents, and 416 that had been
found begging in the street, is contrasted with the show-
ing of $1,337.21 deposited in the school savings banks by
1,745 pupils, something like an adequate idea is gained of
the scope of the Society's work in the city.

A large share of it, in a sense the largest, certainly that
productive of the happiest results, lies outside of the city,
however. From the lodging-houses and the schools are
drawn the battalions of young emigrants that go every
year to homes in the Far West, to grow up self-supporting
men and women safe from the temptations and the vice
of the city. Their number runs far up in the thousands.
The Society never loses sight of them. The records show
that the great mass, with this start given them, become
useful citizens, an honor to the communities in which
their lot is cast. Not a few achieve place and prominence
in their new surroundings. Rarely bad reports come of
them. Occasionally one comes back, lured by homesick-
ness even for the slums; but the briefest stay generally
cures the disease for good. I helped once to see a party
off for Michigan, the last sent out by that great friend of
the homeless children, Mrs. Astor, before she died. In
the party was a boy who had been an "Insider" at the
Five Points House of Industry, and brought along as his
only baggage a padlocked and iron-bound box that con-
tained all his wealth, two little white mice of the friend-
liest disposition. They were going with him out to live
on the fat of the land in the fertile West, where they
would never be wanting for a crust. Alas ! for the best-
laid plans of mice and men. The Western diet did not
agree with either. I saw their owner some months later
in the old home at the Five Points. He had come back,
walking part of the way, and was now pleading to be sent

208

HOW THE OTHER HALE LIVES.

out once more. He had at last had enough of the city.
His face fell when I asked him about the mice. It was
a sad story, indeed. " They had so much corn to eat," he
said, " and they couldn't stand it. They burned all up
inside, and then they busted."

Mrs. Astor set an example during her noble and useful
life in gathering every year a company of homeless boys
from the streets and sending them to good homes, with
decent clothes on their backs — she had sent out no less
than thirteen hundred when she died, and left funds to
carry on her work — that has been followed by many who,
like her, had the means and the heart for such a labor of
love. Most of the lodging-houses and school-buildings of
the society were built by some one rich man or woman
who paid all the bills, and often objected to have even the
name of the giver made known to the world. It is one of
the pleasant experiences of life that give one hope and
courage in the midst of all this misery to find names, that
stand to the unthinking mass only for money-getting and
grasping, associated with such unheralded benefactions
that carry their blessings down to generations yet unborn.
It is not so lung since I found the carriage of a woman,
whose name is synonymous with millions, standing in
front of the boys' lodging-house in Thirty-fifth Street.
Its owner was at that moment busy with a surgeon mak-
ing a census of the crippled lads in the brush-shop, the
most miserable of all the Society's charges, as a prelim-
inary to fitting them out with artificial limbs.

Farther uptown than any reared by the Children's Aid
Society, in Sixty-seventh Street, stands a lodging-house
intended for boys of a somewhat larger growth than most
of those whom the Society shelters. Unlike the others,
too, it was built by the actual labor of the young men it

THE STEEET ARAB.

209

was designed to benefit. In the day when more of the
boys from our streets shall find their way to it and to the
New York Trade Schools, of which it is a kind of home
annex, we shall be in a fair way of solving in the most
natural of all ways the question what to do with this boy,
in spite of the ignorant opposition of the men whose ty-
rannical policy is now to blame for the showing that, out
of twenty-three millions of dollars paid annually to me-
chanics in the building trades in this city, less than six
millions go to the workman born in Xew York, while his
boy roams the streets with every chance of growing up a
vagabond and next to none of becoming an honest artisan.
Colonel Auchmuty is a practical philanthropist to whom
the growing youth of Xew York will one day owe a debt
of gratitude not easily paid. The progress of the system
of trade schools established by him, at which a young man
may acquire the theory as well as the practice of a trade
in a few months at a merely nominal outlay, has not been
nearly as rapid as was to be desired, though the fact that
other cities are copying the model, with their master me-
chanics as the prime movers in the enterprise, testifies to
its excellence. But it has at last taken a real start, and
with union men and even the officers of unions now send-
ing their sons to the trade schools to be taught,* one
may perhaps be permitted to hope that an era of better
sense is dawning that shall witness a rescue work upon
lines which, when the leaven has fairly had time to work,
will put an end to the existence of the Xew York Street
Arab, of the native breed at least.

* Colonel Auclirauty's own statement.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE REIGN OF RUM.

WHERE God builds a church the devil builds next
door — a saloon, is an old saying that has lost its
point in Isew York. Either the devil was on the ground
first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the way of
building. I tried once to find out how the account stood,
and counted to 111 Protestant churches, chapels, and
places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth Street,
4,065 saloons. The worst half of the tenement population
lives down there, and it has to this day the worst half of
the saloons. Uptown the account stands a little better,
but there are easily ten saloons to every church to-day.
I am afraid, too, that the congregations are larger by a
good deal ; certainly the attendance is steadier and the
contributions more liberal the week round, Sunday in-
cluded. Turn and twist it as we may, over against every
bulwark for decency and morality which society erects, the
saloon projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever
it falls into the lives of the poor.

Xo where is its mark so broad or so black. To their
misery it sticketh closer than a brother, persuading them
that within its doors only is refuge, relief. It has the
best of the argument, too, for it is true, worse pity, that
in many a tenement-house block the saloon is the one
bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found.

THE REIGN OF RUM.

211

It is a sorry admission to make, that to bring the rest of
the neighborhood up to the level of the saloon would be
one way of squelching it ; but it is so. Wherever the
tenements thicken, it multiplies. Upon the direst poverty
of their crowds it grows fat and prosperous, levying upon it
a tax heavi ^than all the rest of its grievous burdens com-
bined. It is not yet two years since the Excise Board
made the rule that no three corners of any street-crossing,
not already so occupied, should thenceforward be licensed
for rum-selling. And the tardy prohibition was intended
for the tenement districts. Nowhere else is there need of
it. One may walk many miles through the homes of the
poor searching vainly for an open reading-room, a cheer-
ful coffee-house, a decent club that is not a cloak for the
traffic in rum. The dramshop yawns at every step, the
poor man's club, his forum and his haven of rest when
weary and disgusted with the crowding, the quarrelling,
and the wretchedness at home. With the poison dealt
out there he takes his politics, in quality not far apart.
As the source, so the stream. The rumshop turns the
political crank in New York. The natural yield is rum
politics. Of what that means, successive Boards of Alder-
men, composed in a measure, if not of a majority, of dive-
keepers, have given New York a taste. The disgrace of
the infamous " Boodle Board " will be remembered until
some corruption even fouler crops out and throws it into
the shade.

What relation the saloon bears to the crowds, let me il-
lustrate by a comparison. Below Fourteenth Street were,
when the Health Department took its first accurate census
of the tenements a year and a half ago, 13,220 of the 32,-
390 buildings classed as such in the whole city. Of the
eleven hundred thousand tenants, not quite half a million,

212

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

embracing a host of more than sixty-three thousand chil-
dren under five years of age, lived below that line. Be-
low it, also, were 234 of the cheap lodging-houses ac-
counted for by the police last year, with a total of four
millions and a half of lodgers for the twelvemonth, 59 of
the city's 110 pawnshops, and 4,065 of its 7;884 saloons.
The four most densely peopled precincts, the Fourth,
Sixth, Tenth, and Eleventh, supported together in round
numbers twelve hundred saloons, and their returns showed
twenty-seven per cent, of the whole number of arrests for
the year. The Eleventh Precinct, that has the greatest
and the poorest crowds of all — it is the Tenth Ward — and
harbored one-third of the army of homeless lodgers and
fourteen per cent, of all the prisoners of the year, kept 485
saloons going in 1889. It is not on record that one of
them all failed for want of support. A number of them,
on the contrary, had brought their owners wealth and
prominence. From their bars these eminent citizens
stepped proudly into the councils of the city and the State.
The very floor of one of the bar-rooms, in a neighborhood
that lately resounded with the cry for bread of starving
workmen, is paved with silver dollars !

East Side poverty is not alone in thus rewarding the ty-
rants that sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treach-
erous poison. The Fourth Ward points with pride to the
honorable record of the conductors of its " Tub of Blood,"
and a dozen bar-rooms with less startling titles ; the West
Side to the wealth and " social " standing of the owners of
such resorts as the " Witches' Broth " and the " Plug Hat "
in the region of Hell's Kitchen three-cent whiskey, names
ominous of the concoctions brewed there and of their fa-
tally generous measure. Another ward, that boasts some
of the best residences and the bluest blood on Manhattan

THE REIGN OF RUM.

213

Island, honors with political leadership in the ruling party
the proprietor of one of the most disreputable Black-and-
Tan dives and dancing-hells to be found anywhere.
Criminals and policemen alike do him homage. The list
might be strung out to make texts for sermons with
a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in
our pulpits on Sunday. But I have not set out to write
the political history of New York. Besides, the list would
not be complete. Secret dives are skulking in the slums
and out of them, that are not labelled respectable by a
Board of Excise and support no " family entrance." Their
business, like that of the stale-beer dives, is clone through
a side-door the week through. ~No one knows the number
of unlicensed saloons in the city. Those who have made
the matter a study estimate it at a thousand, more or less.
The police make occasional schedules of a few and report
them to headquarters. Perhaps there is a farce in the
police court, and there the matter ends. Bum and " in-
fluence "are synonymous terms. The interests of the one
rarely suffer for the want of attention from the other.

With the exception of these free lances that treat the
law openly with contempt, the saloons all hang out a sign
announcing in fat type that no beer or liquor is sold to
children. In the down-town " morgues " that make the
lowest degradation of tramp-humanity pan out a paying
interest, as in the " reputable resorts " uptown where In-
spector Byrnes's men spot their worthier quarry elbowing
citizens whom the idea of associating with a burglar would
give a shock they wrould not get over for a week, this sign
is seen conspicuously displayed. Though apparently it
means submission to a beneficent law, in reality the sign
is a heartless, cruel joke. I doubt if one child in a thou-
sand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average

THE REIGN OF RUM.

215

New York bar, is sent away empty-handed, if able to pay
for what he wants. I once followed a little boy, who
shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that
he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher on the icy
pavement, into a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a
sign hung on the wall, and forbade the barkeeper to serve
the boy. The man was as astonished at my interference
as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home,
which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for
it was after 1 a.m., the legal closing hour. He was migh-
ty indignant too, and told me roughly to go away and
mind my business, while he filled the pitcher. The law
prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about as much
respected in the tenement-house districts as the ordinance
against swearing. Newspaper readers will recall the
story, told little more than a year ago, of a boy who after
carrying beer a whole day for a shopful of men over on
the East Side, where his father worked, crept into the cel-
lar to sleep off the effects of his own share in the rioting.
It was Saturday evening. Sunday his parents sought him
high and low ; but it was not until Monday morning,
when the shop was opened, that he was found, killed and
half-eaten by the rats that overran the place.

All the evil the saloon does in breeding poverty and
in corrupting politics ; all the suffering it brings into the
lives of its thousands of innocent victims^ the wives and
children of drunkards it sends forth to curse the commu-
nity ; its fostering of crime and its shielding of criminals —
it is all as nothing to this, its worst offence. In its affinity
for the thief there is at least this compensation that, as it
makes, it also unmakes him. It starts him on his career
only to trip him up and betray him into the hands of the
law, when the rum he exchanged for his honesty has stolen

216

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

his brains as well. For the corruption of the child there
is no restitution. None is possible. It saps the very
vitals of society ; undermines its strongest defences, and
delivers them over to the enemy. Fostered and filled by
the saloon, the " growler " looms up in the New York
street boy's life, baffling the most persistent efforts to re-
claim him. There is no escape from it ; no hope for the
boy, once its blighting grip is upon him. Thenceforward
the logic of the slums, that the world which gave him pov-
erty and ignorance for his portion " owes him a living," is
his creed, and the career of the " tough " lies open before
him, a beaten track to be blindly followed to a bad end in
the wake of the growler.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

rpiIE " growler " stood at the cradle of the tough. It
bosses him through his boyhood apprenticeship in the
"gang," and leaves him, for a time only, at the door of
the jail that receives him to finish his training and turn
him loose upon the world a thief, to collect by stealth or
by force the living his philosophy tells him that it owes
him, and will not voluntarily surrender without an equiva-
lent in the work which he hates. From the moment he,
almost a baby, for the first time carries the growler for
beer, he is never out of its reach, and the two soon form
a partnership that lasts through life. It has at least the
merit, such as it is, of being loyal. The saloon is the only
thing that takes kindly to the lad. Honest play is inter-
dicted in the streets. The policeman arrests the ball-tossers,
and there is no room in the back-yard. In one of these,
between two enormous tenements that swarmed with chil-
dren, I read this ominous notice : " All boys caught in
this yard will be delt with accorden to IdwP

Along the water-fronts, in the holes of the dock-rats,
and on the avenues, the young tough finds plenty of kin-
dred spirits. Every corner has its gang, not always on the
best of terms with the rivals in the next block, but all
with a common programme : defiance of law and order,
and with a common ambition : to get " pinched," i.e., ar-
rested, so as to pose as heroes before their fellows. A

218

HOW THE OTTIEK HALF LIVES.

successful raid on the grocer's till is a good mark, " doing
up " a policeman cause for promotion. The gang is an in-
stitution in Xew York. The police deny its existence
while nursing the bruises received in nightly battles with
it that tax their utmost resources. The newspapers chron-
icle its doings daily, with a sensational minuteness of de-
tail that does its share toward keeping up its evil tradi-
tions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as
bad as the worst. The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement-
house growth. It was born there, endowed with a herit-
age of instinctive hostility to restraint by a generation
that sacrificed home to freedom, or left its country for its
country's good. The tenement received and nursed the
seed. The intensity of the American temper stood spon-
sor to the murderer in what would have been the common
" bruiser " of a more phlegmatic clime. Xew York's
tough represents the essence of reaction against the old
and the new oppression, nursed in the rank soil of its
slums. Its gangs are made up of the American-born sons
of English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect ex-
actly the conditions of the tenements from which they
sprang. Murder is as congenial to Cherry Street or to
Battle Row, as quiet and order to Murray Hill. The "as-
similation" of Europe's oppressed hordes, upon wThich our
Fourth of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect.
The product is our own.

Such is the genesis of Xew York's gangs. Their his-
tory is not so easily written. It would embrace the larg-
est share of our city's criminal history for two genera-
tions back, every page of it dyed red with blood. The
guillotine Paris set up a century ago to avenge its wrongs
was not more relentless, or less discriminating, than this
Xemesis of Xew York. The difference is of intent.

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

219

Murder with that was the serious purpose ; with ours it
is the careless incident, the wanton brutality of the mo-
ment. Bravado and robbery are the real purposes of the
gangs ; the former prompts the attack upon the police-
man, the latter that upon the citizen. Within a single
week last spring, the newspapers recorded six murderous
assaults on unoffending people, committed by young high-
waymen in the public streets. How many more were
suppressed by the police, who always do their utmost to
hush up such outrages " in the interests of justice," I shall
not say. There has been no lack of such occurrences since,
as the records of the criminal courts show. In fact, the
past summer has seen, after a period of comparative
quiescence of the gangs, a reawakening to renewed tur-
bulence of the East Side tribes, and over and over again
the reserve forces of a precinct have been called out to
club them into submission. It is a peculiarity of the
gangs that they usually break out in spots, as it were.
When the West Side is in a state of eruption, the East Side
gangs " lie low," and when the toughs along the North
River are pursing broken heads at home, or their revenge
in Sing Sing, fresh trouble breaks out in the tenements
east of Third Avenue. This result is brought about by the
very efforts made by the police to put down the gangs.
In spite of local feuds, there is between them a species of
ruffianly Freemasonry that readily admits to full fellow-
ship a hunted rival in the face of the common enemy.
The gangs belt the city like a huge chain from the Bat-
tery to Harlem — the collective name of the " chain gang"
has been given to their scattered groups in the belief that
a much closer connection exists between them than com-
monly supposed — and the ruffian for whom the East Side
has became too hot, has only to step across town and

220 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

change his name, a matter usually much easier for him
than to change his shirt, to find a sanctuary in which to
plot fresh outrages. The more notorious he is, the warmer
the welcome, and if he has " done " his man he is by
common consent accorded the leadership in his new field.

From all this it might be inferred that the Kew York
tough is a very fierce individual, of indomitable courage
and naturally as blood-thirsty as a tiger. On the contrary
he is an arrant coward. His instincts of ferocity are
those of the wolf rather than the tiger. It is only when
he hunts with the pack that he is dangerous. Then his
inordinate vanity makes him forget all fear or caution in
the desire to distinguish himself before his fellows, a
result of his swallowing all the flash literature and penny-
dreadfuls he can beg, borrow, or steal — and there is never
any lack of them — and of the strongly dramatic element
in his nature that is nursed by such a diet into rank and
morbid growth. He is a queer bundle of contradictions
at all times. Drunk and foul-mouthed, ready to cut the
throat of a defenceless stranger at the toss of a cent, fresh
from beating his decent mother black and blue to get money
for rum,* he will resent as an intolerable insult the imputa-
tion that he is " no gentleman." Fighting his battles
with the coward's weapons, the brass-knuckles and the
deadly sand-bag, or with brick-bats from the housetops,

* This very mother will implore the court with tears, the next morn-
ing, to let her renegade son off. A poor woman, who claimed to be the
widow of a soldier, applied to the Tenement-house Relief Committee of
the King's Daughters last summer, to he sent to some home, as she had
neither kith nor kin to care for her. Upon investigation it was found
that she had four big sons, all toughs, who beat her regularly and took
from her all the money she could earn or beg ; she was " a respectable
woman, of good habits," the inquiry developed, and lied only to shield
her rascally sons.

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

221

he is still in all seriousness a lover of fair play, and as
likely as not, when his gang has downed a policeman in a
battle that has cost a dozen broken heads, to be found next
saving a drowning child or woman at the peril of his own
life. It depends on the angle at which he is seen, whether
he is a cowardly ruffian, or a possible hero with different
training and under different social conditions. Ready wit
he has at all times, and there is less meanness in his make-
up than in that of the bully of the London slums ; but an
intense love of show and applause, that carries him to any
length of bravado, which his twin-brother across the sea
entirely lacks. I have a very vivid recollection of seeing
one of his tribe, a robber and murderer before he was
nineteen, go to the gallows unmoved, all fear of the rope
overcome, as it seemed, by the secret, exultant pride of
being the centre of a first-class show, shortly to be fol-
lowed by that acme of tenement-life bliss, a big funeral,
lie had his reward. His name is to this day a talisman
among West Side ruffians, and is proudly borne by the
gang of which, up till the night when he " knocked out
his man, ".he was an obscure though aspiring member.

The crime that made McGloin famous was the coward-
ly murder of an unarmed saloonkeeper who came upon
the gang while it was sacking his bar-room at the dead of
night. McGloin might easily have fled, but disdained to
"run for a Dutchman." His act was a fair measure of
the standard of heroism set up by his class in its conflicts
with society. The finish is worthy of the start. The first
long step in crime taken by the half-grown boy, fired with
ambition to earn a standing in his gang, is usually to rob
a " lush," i.e., a drunken man who has strayed his way,
likely enough is lying asleep in a hallway. He has served
an apprenticeship on copper-bottom wash-boilers and like

222

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

articles found lying around loose, and capable of being
converted into cash enough to give the growler a trip or
two ; but his first venture at robbery moves him up into
full fellowship at once. He is no longer a " kid," though
his years may be few, but a tough with the rest. He may
even in time — he is reasonably certain of it — get his name
in the papers as a murderous scoundrel, and have his cup
of glory filled to the brim. I came once upon a gang of
such young rascals passing the growler after a successful
raid of some sort, down at the West Thirty-seventh Street
dock, and, having my camera along, offered to "take"
them. They were not old and wary enough to be shy of
the photographer, whose acquaintance they usually first
make in handcuffs and the grip of a policeman ; or their
vanity overcame their caution. It is entirely in keeping
with the tough's character that he should love of all
things to pose before a photographer, and the ambition is
usually the stronger the more repulsive the tough. These
wrere of that sort, and accepted the offer with great readi-
ness, dragging into their group a disreputable-looking sheep
that roamed about with them (the slaughter-houses were
close at hand) as one of the band. The homeliest ruffian
of the lot, who insisted on being taken with the growler to
his " mug," took the opportunity to pour what was left in
it down his throat and this caused a brief unpleasantness,
but otherwise the performance was a success. While I
was getting the camera ready, I threw out a vague sugges-
tion of cigarette-pictures, and it took root at once. Noth-
ing would do then but that I must take the boldest spirits
of the company " in character." One of them tumbled over
against a shed, as if asleep, while two of the others bent
over him, searching his pockets wTith a deftness that was
highly suggestive. This, they explained for my benefit,

A GROWLER GANG IN SESSION.

224

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

was to show how they " did the trick.*' The rest of the
band were so impressed with the importance of this ex-
hibition that they insisted on crowding into the picture by
climbing upon the shed, sitting on the roof with their feet
dangling over the edge, and disposing themselves in every
imaginable manner within view, as thev thought. Lest
any reader be led into the error of supposing them to have
been harmless young fellows enjoying themselves in peace,
let me say that within half an hour after our meeting,
when I called at the police station three blocks away, I
found there two of my friends of the " Montgomery
Guards " under arrest for robbing a Jewish pedlar who
had passed that way after I left them, and trying to saw
his head off, as they put it, "just for fun. The sheeny
cum along an' the saw was there, an' we socked it to
him." The prisoners were described to me by the police
as Dennis, " the Bum," and " Mud " Foley.

It is not always that their little diversions end as harm-
lessly as did this, even from the standpoint of the Jew,
who was pretty badly hurt. Not far from the preserves
of the Montgomery Guards, in Poverty Gap, directly op-
posite the scene of the murder to which I have referred
in a note explaining the picture of the Cunningham fam-
ily (p. 169), a young lad, who was the only support of his
aged parents, was beaten to death within a few months by
the " Alley Gang," for the same offence that drew down
the displeasure of its neighbors upon the pedlar : that of
being at work trying to earn an honest living. I found a
part of the gang asleep the next morning, before young
Healey's death was known, in a heap of straw on the floor
of an unoccupied room in the same row of rear tenements
in which the murdered boy's home was. One of the ten-
ants, who secretly directed me to their lair, assuring me

THE HARVEST OF TAEES.

225

that no worse scoundrels went unhung, ten minutes later
gave the gang, to its face, an official character for sobriety
and inoffensiveness that very nearly startled me into an
unguarded rebuke of his duplicity. I caught his eye in
time and held my peace. The man was simply trying to
protect his own home, while giving such aid as he safely
could toward bringing the murderous ruffians to justice.
The incident shows to what extent a neighborhood may
be terrorized by a determined gang of these reckless
toughs.

In Poverty Gap there were still a few decent people
left. When it comes to Hell's Kitchen, or to its compeers
at the other end of Thirty-ninth Street over by the East
River, and further down First Avenue in " the Tillage,"
the Rag Gang and its allies have no need of fearing
treachery in their periodical battles with the police. The
entire neighborhood takes a hand on these occasions, the
women in the front rank, partly from sheer love of the
" fun," but chiefly because husbands, brothers, and sweet-
hearts are in the fight to a man and need their help.
Chimney-tops form the staple of ammunition then, and
stacks of loose brick and paving-stones, carefully hoarded
in upper rooms as a prudent provision against emergen-
cies. Regular patrol posts are established by the police
on the housetops in times of trouble in these localities,
but even then they do not escape whole-skinned, if, in-
deed, with their lives; neither does the gang. The
policeman knows of but one cure for the tough, the club,
and he lays it on without stint whenever and wherever he
has the chance, knowing right well that, if caught at a
disadvantage, he will get his outlay back wTith interest.
Words are worse than wasted in the gang-districts. It is
a blow at sight, and the tough thus accosted never stops
15

226

B.OVT THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

to ask questions. Unless lie is " wanted " for some signal
outrage, the policeman rarely bothers with arresting him.
He can point out half a dozen at sight against whom in-
dictments are pending by the basketful, but whom no jail
ever held many hours. They only serve to make him
more reckless, for he knows that the political backing that
has saved him in the past can do it again. It is a commo-
dity that is only exchangeable " for value received," and
it is not hard to imagine what sort of value is in demand.
The saloon, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, stands
behind the bargain.

For these reasons, as well as because he knows from fre-
quent experience his own way to be the best, the police-
man lets the gangs alone except when they come within
reach of his long night-stick. They have their "club-
rooms " where they meet, generally in a tenement, some-
times under a pier or a dump, to carouse, play cards, and
plan their raids ; their " fences," who dispose of the
stolen property. When the necessity presents itself for
a descent upon the gang after some particularly flagrant
outrage, the police have a task on hand that is not of the
easiest. The gangs, like foxes, have more than one hole
to their dens. In some localities, wdiere the interior of a
block is filled with rear tenements, often set at all sorts of
odd angles, surprise alone is practicable. Pursuit through
the winding ways and passages is impossible. The young
thieves know them all by heart. They have their runways
over roofs and fences which no one else could find.
Their lair is generally selected with special reference to
its possibilities of escape. Once pitched upon, its occupa-
tion by the gang, with its ear-mark of nightly symposiums,
" can-rackets" in the slang of the street, is the signal for
a rapid deterioration of the tenement, if that is possible.

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

227

Relief is only to be had by ousting the intruders. An
instance came under my notice in which valuable property
had been well-nigh ruined by being made the thorough-
fare of thieves by night and by day. They had chosen it
because of a passage that led through the block by way
of several connecting halls and yards. The place came
soon to be known as " Murderers Alley." Complaint was
made to the Board of Health, as a last resort, of the con-
dition of the property. The practical inspector who was
sent to report upon it suggested to the owner that he
build a brick-wall in a place where it would shut off com-
munication between the streets, and he took the advice.
WithiD the brief space of a few months the house changed
character entirely, and became as decent as it had been
before the convenient runway was discovered.

This was in the Sixth Ward, where the infamous Whyo
Gang until a few years ago absorbed the worst depravity
of the Bend and what is left of the Five Points. The
gang was finally broken up when its leader was hanged for
murder after a life of uninterrupted and unavenged
crimes, the recital of which made his father confessor turn
pale, listening in the shadow of the scaffold, though many
years of labor as chaplain of the Tombs had hardened him
to such rehearsals. The great Whyo had been a " power
in the ward," handy at carrying elections for the party or
faction that happened to stand in need of his services and
was willing to pay for them in money or in kind. Other
gangs have sprung up since with as high ambition and
a fair prospect of outdoing their predecessor. The con-
ditions that bred it still exist, practically unchanged.
Inspector Byrnes is authority for the statement that
throughout the city the young tough has more " ability "
and " nerve " than the thief whose example he successfully

228 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

emulates. He begins earlier, too. Speaking of the
increase of the native element among criminal prisoners
exhibited in the census returns of the last thirty years,*
the Rev. Fred. II. Wines says, " their youth is a very
striking fact." Had he confined his observations to the
police courts of New York, he might have emphasized
that remark and found an explanation of the discovery

TYPICAL TOUGHS (FROM THE ROGUES' GALLERY).

that " the ratio of prisoners in cities is two and one-quarter
times as great as in the country at large," a computation
that takes no account of the reformatories for juvenile
delinquents, or the exhibit would have been still more
striking. Of the 82,200 persons arrested by the police in

* " The percentage of foreign-born prisoners in 1850. as compared
with that of natives, was more than five times that of native prisoners,
now (1880) it is less than double." — American Prisons in the Tenth
Census.

THE HARVEST OF TAKES.

229

1889, 10,505 were under twenty years old. The last
report of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children enumerates, as " a few typical cases," eighteen
" professional cracksmen," between nine and fifteen years
old, who had been caught with burglars' tools, or in the act
of robbery. Four of them, hardly yet in long trousers,
had " held up " a wayfarer in the public street and robbed
him of §73. One, aged sixteen, " was the leader of a
noted gang of young robbers in Forty-ninth Street. He
committed murder, for which he is now serving a term of
nineteen years in State's Prison." Four of the eighteen
were girls and quite as bad as the wrorst. In a few years
they would have been living with the toughs of their
choice without the ceremony of a marriage, egging them
on by their pride in their lawless achievements, and fight-
ing side by side with them in their encounters with the
" cops."

The exploits of the Paradise Park Gang in the way of
highway robbery showed last summer that the embers of
the scattered Whyo Gang, upon the wreck of which it
grew, were smouldering still. The hanging of Driscoll
broke up the Whyos because they were a comparatively
small band, and, with the incomparable master-spirit
gone, were unable to resist the angry rush of public in-
dignation that followed the crowning outrage. This is the
history of the passing away of famous gangs from time to
time. The passing is more apparent than real, however.
Some other daring leader gathers the scattered elements
about him soon, and the war on society is resumed. A
bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs
would occupy pages of this book. The Pock Gang, the
Pag Gang, the Stable Gang, and the Short Tail Gang
down about the "Hook " have all achieved bad eminence,

230

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

along with scores of others that have not paraded so fre-
quently in the newspapers. By day they loaf in the cor-
ner-groggeries on their beat, at night they plunder the
stores along the avenues, or lie in wait at the river for un-
steady feet straying their way. The man who is sober
and minds his own business they seldom molest, unless he
be a stranger inquiring his way, or a policeman and the
gang twenty against the one. The tipsy wayfarer is their
chosen victim, and they seldom have to look for him
long. One has not far to go to the river from any point
in Xew York. The man who does not know where he is
going is sure to reach it sooner or later. Should he fool-
ishly resist or make an outcry — dead men tell no tales.
" Floaters" come ashore every now and then with pockets
turned inside out, not always evidence of a post-mortem
inspection by dock-rats. Police patrol the rivers as
well as the shore on constant look-out for these, but sel-
dom catch up with them. If overtaken after a race dur-
ing which shots are often exchanged from the boats, the
thieves have an easy way of escaping and at the same
time destroying the evidence against them ; they simply
upset the boat. They swim, one and all, like real rats ;
the lost plunder can be recovered at leisure the next day
by diving or grappling. The loss of the boat counts for
little. Another is stolen, and the gang is ready for busi-
ness again.

The fiction of a social " club," which most of the gangs
keep up, helps them to a pretext for blackmailing the poli-
ticians and the storekeepers in their bailiwick at the an-
nual seasons 01 their picnic, or ball. The " thieves' ball "
is as well known and recognized an institution on the East
Side as the Charity Ball in a different social stratum, al-
though it does not go by that name, in print at least.

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

231

Indeed, the last thing a New York tough will admit is
that he is a thief. He dignifies his calling with the pre-
tence of gambling. He does not steal : he " wins " your
money or your watch, and on the police returns he is a
"speculator.'' If, when he passes around the hat for

HUNTING RIVER THIEVES.

" voluntary " contributions, any storekeeper should have
the temerity to refuse to chip in, he may look for a visit
from the gang on the first dark night, and account himself
lucky if his place escapes being altogether wrecked. The
Heirs Kitchen Gans; and the Has; Gail** have both distin-

232 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

guished themselves within recent times by blowing up ob-
jectionable stores with stolen gunpowder. But if no such
episode mar the celebration, the excursion comes off and
is the occasion for a series of drunken fights that as likely
as not end in murder. No season has passed within my
memory that has not seen the police reserves called out to
receive some howling pandemonium returning from a pic-
nic grove on the Hudson or on the Sound. At least one
peaceful community up the river, that had borne with this
nuisance until patience had ceased to be a virtue, received
a boat-load of such picnickers in a style befitting the occa-
sion and the cargo. The outraged citizens planted a
howitzer on the dock, and bade the party land at their
peril. With the loaded gun pointed dead at them, the
furious toughs gave up and the peace was not broken
on the Hudson that day, at least not ashore. It is good
cause for congratulation that the worst 'of all forms of re-
creation popular among the city's toughs, the moonlight
picnic, has been effectually discouraged. Its opportuni-
ties for disgraceful revelry and immorality were unrivalled
anywhere.

In spite of influence and protection, the tough reaches
eventually the end of his rope. Occasionally — not too
often — there is a noose on it. If not, the world that owes
him a living, according to his creed, will insist on his earn-
ing it on the safe side of a prison wall. A few, a very few,
have been clubbed into an approach to righteousness from
the police standpoint. The condemned tough goes up to
serve his " bit " or couple of " stretches," followed by the
applause of his gang. In the prison he meets older
thieves than himself, and sits at their feet listening with
respectful admiration to their accounts of the great do-
ings that sent them before. He returns with the brand

THE HARVEST OF TARES.

233

of the jail upon him, to encounter the hero-worship of his
old associates as an offset to the cold shoulder given him
by all the rest of the world. Even if he is willing to
work, disgusted with the restraint and hard labor of
prison life, and in a majority of cases that thought is
probably uppermost in his mind, no one will have him
around. If, with the assistance of Inspector Byrnes, who
is a philanthropist in his own practical way, he secures a
job, he is discharged on the slightest provocation, and for
the most trifling fault. Very soon he sinks back into his
old surroundings, to rise no more until he is lost to view
in the queer, mysterious way in which thieves and fallen
women disappear. Xo one can tell how. In the ranks
of criminals he never rises above that of the " laborer,"
the small thief or burglar, or general crook, who blindly
does the work planned for him by others, and runs the
biggest risk for the poorest pay. It cannot be said that
the "growler" brought him luck, or its friendship fort-
une. And yet, -if his misdeeds have helped to make man-
ifest that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin with
the conditions of life against which his very existence is
a protest, even the tough lias not lived in vain. This
measure of credit at least should be accorded him, that,
with or without his good-will, he has been a factor in
urging on the battle against the slums that bred him.
It is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly the price
of liberty and the preservation of society.

CHAPTER XX.

THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK.

OF the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity and reaped
in wrath, the police returns tell the story. The pen
that wrote the " Song of the Shirt " is needed to tell of
the sad and toil-worn lives of New York's working-
women. The cry echoes by night and by day through its
tenements :

Oh, God ! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap !

Six months have not passed since at a great public meet-
ing in this city, the Working Women's Society reported :
" It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below
a limit upon which they can exist, but woman's wages
have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to
her. It is simply impossible for any woman to live with-
out assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns, with-
out depriving herself of real necessities. . . It is inev-
itable that they must in many instances, resort to evil."
It was only a few brief weeks before that verdict was ut-
tered, that the community was shocked by the story of a
gentle and refined woman who, left in direst poverty to
earn her own living alone among strangers, threw herself
from her attic window, preferring death to dishonor. " I
would have done any honest work, even to scrubbing,"

THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK. 235

she wrote, drenched and starving, after a vain search for
work in a driving storm. She had tramped the streets
for weeks on her weary errand, and the only living wages
that were offered her were the wages of sin. The ink
was not dry upon her letter before a woman in an East
Side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder :
" Weakness, sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. My
strength fails me. Sing at my coffin : ' Where does the
soul find a home and rest ? ' " Her story may be found as
one of two typical " cases of despair " in one little church
community, in the City Mission Society's Monthly for
last February. It is a story that has many parallels in
the experience of every missionary, every police reporter
and every family doctor whose practice is among the
poor.

It is estimated that at least one hundred and fifty
thousand women and girls earn their own living in New
York ; but there is reason to believe that this estimate
falls far short of the truth when sufficient account is taken
of the large number who are not wholly dependent upon
their own labor, while contributing by it to the family's
earnings. These alone constitute a large class of the wo-
men wasre-earners, and it is characteristic of the situation
that the very fact that some need not starve on their
wages condemns the rest to that fate. "The pay they are
willing to accept all have to take. What the " everlast-
ing law of supply and demand," that serves as such a con-
venient gag for public indignation, has to do with it, one
learns from observation all along the road of inquiry into
these real woman's wrongs. To take the case of the sales-
women for illustration : The investigation of the Work-
ing Women's Society disclosed the fact that wages averag-
ing from $2 to $1.50 a week were reduced by excessive fines,

236 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

the employers placing a value upon time lost that is not
given to services rendered." A little girl, who received
two dollars a week, made cash-sales amounting to $167 in
a single day, while the receipts of a fifteen-dollar male
clerk in the same department footed up only $125 ; yet
for some trivial mistake the girl was fined sixty cents out
of her two dollars. The practice prevailed in some stores
of dividing the fines between the superintendent and the
time-keeper at the end of the year. In one instance they
amounted to $3,000, and " the superintendent was heard to
charge the time-keeper with not being strict enough in
his duties." One of the causes for fine in a certain large
store was sitting down. The law requiring seats for sales-
women, generally ignored, was obeyed faithfully in this
establishment. The seats were there, but the girls were
fined when found using them.

Cash-girls receiving $1.75 a week for work that at cer-
tain seasons lengthened their day to sixteen hours were
sometimes required to pay for their aprons. A common
cause for discharge from stores in which, on account of
the oppressive heat and lack of ventilation, " girls fainted
day after day and came out looking like corpses," was too
long service. No other fault was found with the dis-
charged saleswomen than that they had been long enough
in the employ of the firm to justly expect an increase of
salary. The reason was even given with brutal frank-
ness, in some instances.

These facts give a slight idea of the hardships and the
poor pay of a business that notoriously absorbs child-labor.
The girls are sent to the store before they have fairly en-
tered their teens, because the money they can earn there
is needed for the support of the family. If the boys will
not work, if the street tempts them from home, among

THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK.

237

the girls at least there must be no drones. To keep their
places they are told to lie about their age and to say that
they are over fourteen. The precaution is usually super-
fluous. The Women's Investigating Committee found the
majority of the children employed in the stores to be un-
der age, but heard only in a single instance of the truant
officers calling. In that case they came once a year and
sent the youngest children home ; but in a month's time
they were all back in their places, and were not again dis-
turbed. When it comes to the factories, where hard bod-
ily labor is added to long hours, stifling rooms, and starva-
tion wages, matters are even worse. The Legislature lias
passed laws to prevent the employment of children, as it
has forbidden saloon-keepers to sell them beer, and it has
provided means of enforcing its mandate, so efficient, that
the very number of factories in New York is guessed at
as in the neighborhood of twelve thousand. Up till this
summer, a single inspector was charged with the duty of
keeping the run of them all, and of seeing to it that the
law was respected by the owners.

Sixty cents is put as the average day's earnings of the
150,000, but into this computation enters the stylish
"cashier's" two dollars a day, as well as the thirty cents
of the poor little girl who pulls threads in an East Side
factory, and, if anything, the average is 'probably too high.
Such as it is, however, it represents board, rent, clothing,
and " pleasure " to this army of workers. Here is the
case of a woman employed in the manufacturing depart-
ment of a Broadway house. It stands for a hundred like
her own. She averages three dollars a week. Pays $1.50
for her room ; for breakfast she has a cup of coffee ; lunch
she cannot afford. One meal a day is her allowance.
This woman is young, she is pretty. She has " the world

238

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

before her." Is it anything less than a miracle if she is
guilty of nothing worse than the "early and improvident
marriage," against which moralists exclaim as one of the
prolific causes of the distress of the poor? Almost any

SEWING AND STARVING IN AN ELIZABETH STREET ATTIC.

door might seem to offer welcome escape from such slav-
ery as this. " i feel so much healthier since I got three
square meals a day," said a lodger in one of the Girls'
Homes. Two young sewing-girls came in seeking domes-
tic service, so that they might get enough to eat. They

THE WO EKING GIELS OF NEW YOEK.

239

had been only half-fed for some time, and starvation had
driven them to the one door at which the pride of the
American-born girl will not permit her to knock, though
poverty be the price of her independence.

The tenement and the competition of public institu-
tions and farmers' wives and daughters, have done the
tyrant shirt to death, but they have not bettered the lot
of the needle-women. The sweater of the East Side has
appropriated the flannel shirt. He turns them out to-day
at forty-five cents a dozen, paying his Jewish workers
from twenty to thirty-live cents. One of these testified
before the State Board of Arbitration, during the shirt-
makers' strike, that she worked eleven hours in the shop
and four at home, and had never in the best of times
made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she
worked from 4 o'clock in the morning to 11 at night. These
girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own
machines out of their wages. The white shirt has gone to
the public and private institutions that shelter large num-
bers of young girls, and to the country. There are not
half as many shirtmakers in Xew York to-day as only a
few years ago, and some of the largest firms have closed
their city shops. The same is true of the manufacturers
of underwear. One large Broadway firm has nearly all
its work done by farmers' girls in Maine, who think them-
selves well off if they can earn two or three dollars a week
to pay for a Sunday silk, or the wedding outfit, little
dreaming of the part they are playing in starving their city
sisters. Literally, they sew " with double thread, a shroud
as well as a shirt." Their pin-money sets the rate of
wages for thousands of poor sewing-girls in ^ew York.
The average earnings of the worker on underwear to-day
do not exceed the three dollars which her competitor

240

HCHV THE OTHEI1 HALF LIVES.

among the Eastern hills is willing to accept as the price of
her play. The shirtmaker's pay is better only because the
very finest custom work is all there is left for her to do.

Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozen — the
very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten, the
common run five or six — neckties at from 25 to 75 cents
a dozen, with a dozen as a good day's work, are specimens
of women's wages. And yet people persist in wondering
at the poor quality of work done in the tenements! Ital-
ian cheap labor has come of late also to possess this poor
field, with the sweater in its train. There is scarce a
branch of woman's work outside of the home in which
wages, long since at low-water mark, have not fallen to
the point of actual starvation. A case was brought to my
notice recently by a woman doctor, whose heart as well as
her life-work is with the poor, of a widow with two little
children she found at work in an East Side attic, making
paper-bags. Her father, she told the doctor, had made
good wages at it ; but she received only five cents for six
hundred of the little three-cornered bags, and her fingers
had to be very swift and handle the paste-brush very deft-
ly to bring her earnings up to twenty-five and thirty
cents a day. She paid four dollars a month for her room.
The rest went to buy food for herself and the children.
The physician's purse, rather than her skill, had healing
for their complaint.

I have aimed to set down a few dry facts merely. They
carry their own comment. Back of the shop with its
weary, grinding toil — the home in the tenement, of which
it was said in a report of the State Labor Bureau : " De-
cency and womanly reserve cannot be maintained there —
what wonder so many fall away from virtue ? " Of the
outlook, what ? Last Christmas Eve my business took me

THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK. 241

to an obscure street among the West Side tenements. An
old woman had just fallen on the doorstep, stricken with
paralysis. The doctor said she would never again move
her right hand or foot. The whole side was dead. By
her bedside, in their cheerless room, sat the patient's aged
sister, a hopeless cripple, in dumb despair. Forty years
ago the sisters had come, five in number then, with their
mother, from the ^North of Ireland to make their home
and earn a living among strangers. They were lace em-
broiderers and found work easily at good wages. All the
rest had died as the years went by. The two remained
and, firmly resolved to lead an honest life, worked on
though wages fell and fell as age and toil stiffened their
once nimble fingers and dimmed their sight. Then one of
them dropped out, her hands palsied and her courage gone.
Still the other toiled on, resting neither by night nor by
day, that the sister might not want. Xow that she too
had been stricken, as she was going to the store for the
work that was to keep them through the holidays, the
battle was over at last. There was before them starvation,
or the poor-house. And the proud spirits of the sisters,
helpless now, quailed at the outlook.

These were old, with life behind them. For them
nothing was left but to sit in the shadow and wait. But
of the thousands, who are travelling the road they trod
to the end, with the hot blood of youth in their veins,
with the love of life and of the beautiful world to which
not even sixty cents a day can shut their eyes — who is to
blame if their feet find the paths of shame that are " al-
ways open to them ? " The very paths that have effaced
the saving " limit," and to which it is declared to be "in-
evitable that they must in many instances resort." Let
the moralist answer. Let the wise economist apply his
16

242

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

rule of supply and demand, and let the answer be heard in
this city of a thousand charities where justice goes beg-
ging.

To the everlasting credit of New York's working-girl
let it be said that, rough though her road be, all but hope-
less her battle with life, only in the rarest instances does
she go astray. As a class she is brave, virtuous, and true.
New York's army of profligate women is not, as in some
foreign cities, recruited from her ranks. She is as plucky
as she is proud. That "American girls never whimper"
became a proverb long ago, and she accepts her lot un-
complainingly, doing the best she can and holding her
cherished independence cheap at the cost of a meal, or of
half her daily ration, if need be. The home in the tene-
ment and the traditions of her childhood have neither
trained her to luxury nor predisposed her in favor of do-
mestic labor in preference to the shop. So, to the world
she presents a cheerful, uncomplaining front that some-
times deceives it. Her courage will not be without its
reward. Slowly, as the conviction is thrust upon society
that woman's work must enter more and more into its
planning, a better day is dawning. The organization of
working girls' clubs, unions, and societies with a commu-
nity of interests, despite the obstacles to such a movement,
bears testimony to it, as to the devotion of the unselfish
women who have made their poorer sisters' cause their
own, and will yet wring from an unfair world the justice
too lon^ denied her.

CHAPTER XXI.

PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS.

THE reader who has followed with me the fate of the
Other Half thus far, may not experience much of a
shock at being told that in eight years 135,595 families in
New York were registered as asking or receiving charity.
Perhaps, however, the intelligence will rouse him that for
five years past one person in every ten who died in this
city was buried in the Potter's Field. These facts tell a
terrible story. The first means that in a population of a
million and a half, very nearly, if not quite, half a million
persons were driven, or chose, to beg for food, or to ac-
cept it in charity at some period of the eight years, if not
during the whole of it. There is no mistake about these
figures. They are drawn from the records of the Charity
Organization Society, and represent the time during which
it has been in existence. It is not even pretended that
the record is complete. To be well within the limits, the
Society's statisticians allow only three and a half to the
family, instead of the four and a half that are accepted as
the standard of calculations which deal with New York's
population as a whole. They estimate upon the basis of
their every-day experience that, allowing for those who
have died, moved away, or become for the time being at
least self-supporting, eighty-five per cent, of the registry
are still within, or lingering upon, the borders of depen-
dence. Precisely how the case stands with this great

244

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

horde of the indigent is shown by a classification of 5,169
cases that were investigated by the Society in one year.
This was the way it turned out : 327 worthy of continu-
ous relief, or 6.4 percent.; 1,269 worthy of temporary
relief, or 24.4 per cent. ; 2,698 in need of work, rather
than relief, or 52.2 per cent. ; 875 unworthy of relief, or
17 per cent.

That is, nearly six and a half per cent, of all were ut-
terly helpless — orphans, cripples, or the very aged ; nearly
one-fourth needed just a lift to start them on the road of
independence, or of permanent pauperism, according to
the wisdom with which the lever was applied. More than
half were destitute because they had no work and were
unable to find any, and one-sixth were frauds, professional
beggars, training their children to follow in their foot-
steps— a veritable k' tribe of Ishraael," tightening its grip
on society as the years pass, until society shall summon up
pluck to say with Paul, " if any man will not work neither
shall he eat," and stick to it. It is worthy of note that al-
most precisely the same results followed a similar investi-
gation in Boston. There were a few more helpless cases
of the sort true charity accounts it a gain to care for, but
the proportion of a given lot that was crippled for want
of work, or unworthy, was exactly the same as in this
city. The bankrupt in hope, in courage, in purse, and in
purpose, are not peculiar to 2sew York. They are found
the world over, but we have our full share. If further
proof were wanted, it is found in the prevalence of pauper
burials. The Potter's Field stands ever for utter, hope-
less surrender. The last the poor will let go, however
miserable their lot in life, is the hope of a decent burial.
But for the five years ending with 1888 the average of
burials in the Potter's Field has been 10.03 per cent, of

PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS.

245

all. In 1889 it was 9.64. In that year the proportion
to the total mortality of those who died in hospitals, in-
stitutions, and in the Almshouse was as 1 in 5.

The 135,595 families inhabited no fewer than 31,000
different tenements. I say tenements advisedly, though

A FLAT IN THE PAUPER BARRACKS, WEST THIRTY-EIGHTH STREET, WITH ALL ITS
FURNITURE.

the society calls them buildings, because at least ninety-
nine per cent, were found in the big barracks, the rest in
shanties scattered here and there, and now and then a
fraud or an exceptional case of distress in a dwelling-
house of better class. Here, undoubtedly, allowance must
be made for the constant moving about of those who live

246

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

on charity, which enables one active beggar to blacklist
a dozen houses in the year. Still the great mass of the
tenements are shown to be harboring alms-seekers. They
might almost as safely harbor the small -pox. That
scourge is not more contagious than the alms-seeker's com-
plaint. There are houses that have been corrupted
through and through by this pestilence, until their very
atmosphere breathes beggary. More than a hundred and
twenty pauper families have been reported from time to
time as living in one such tenement.

The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as
naturally as weeds in a garden lot. A moral distemper,
like crime, it finds there its most fertile soil. All the
surroundings of tenement-house life favor its growth, and
where once it has taken root it is harder to dislodge than
the most virulent of physical diseases. The thief is in-
finitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the
very fact of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to
the man. Granted that it is bad, there is still some-
thing, a possible handle by which to catch him. To the
pauper there is none. He is as hopeless as his own
poverty. I speak of the pauper, not of the honestly poor.
There is a sharp line between the two ; but athwart it
stands the tenement, all the time blurring and blotting it
out. " It all comes down to character in the end," was
the verdict of a philanthropist whose life has been spent
wrestling with this weary problem. And so it comes
down to the tenement, the destroyer of individuality and
character everywhere. " In nine years," said a wise and
charitable physician, sadly, to me, " I have known of but a
single case of permanent improvement in a poor tenement
family." I have known of some, whose experience, ex-
tending over an even longer stretch, was little better.

PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS.

247

The beggar follows the " tough's " rule of life that the
world owes him a living, but his scheme of collecting it
stops short of violence. He has not the pluck to rob even
a drunken man. His highest flights take in at most an
unguarded clothes-line, or a little child sent to buy bread
or beer with the pennies he clutches tightly as he skips
along. Even then he prefers to attain his end by strata-
gem rather than by force, though occasionally, when the
coast is clear, he rises to the height of the bully. The
ways he finds of u collecting " under the cloak of unde-
served poverty are numberless, and often reflect credit on
the man's ingenuity, if not on the man himself. I remem-
ber the shock with which my first experience with his
kind — her kind, rather, in this case : the beggar was a
woman — came home to me. On my way to and from the
office I had been giving charity regularly, as I fondly be-
lieved, to an old woman who sat in Chatham Square with
a baby done up in a bundle of rags, moaning piteously in
sunshine and rain, "Please, help the poor." It was the
baby I pitied and thought I was doing my little to help,
until one night I was just in time to rescue it from rolling
out of her lap, and found the bundle I had been wasting
my pennies upon just rags and nothing more, and the old
has: dead drunk. Since then I have encountered bo°;us
babies, borrowed babies, and drugged babies in the streets,
and fought shy of them all. Most of them, I am glad to
say, have been banished from the street since ; but they
are still occasionally to be found. It was only last winter
that the officers of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children arrested an Italian woman who was
begging along Madison Avenue with a poor little wreck of
a girl, whose rags and pinched face were calculated to tug
hard at the purse-strings of a miser. Over five dollars in

248

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

nickles and pennies were taken from the woman's pockets,
and when her story of poverty and hunger was investi-
gated at the family's home in a Baxter Street tenement,
bank-books turned up that showed the Masonis to be reg-
ular pauper capitalists, able to draw their check for three
thousand dollars, had they been so disposed. The woman
was fined $250, a worse punishment undoubtedly than to
have sent her to prison for the rest of her natural life.
Her class has, unhappily, representatives in New York
that have not yet been brought to grief.

Nothing short of making street begging a crime has
availed to clear our city of this pest to an appreciable ex-
tent. By how much of an effort this result has been
accomplished may be gleaned from the fact that the Char-
ity Organization Society alone, in five years, caused the
taking up of 2,594 street beggars, and the arrest and con-
viction of 1,474 persistent offenders. Last year it dealt
with 612 perambulating mendicants. The police report
only 19 arrests for begging during the year 1889, but the
real facts of the case are found under the heading " va-
grancy." In all, 2,633 persons were charged with this
offence, 947 of them women. A goodly proportion of
these latter came from the low groggeries of the Tenth
"Ward, where a peculiar variety of the female tramp- beggar
is at home, the " scrub.'' The scrub is one degree per-
haps above the average pauper in this, that she is willing
to work at least one day in the week, generally the Jew-
ish Sabbath. The orthodox Jew can do no work of any
sort from Friday evening till sunset on Saturday, and this
interim the scrub fills out in Ludlow Street. The pittance
she receives for this vicarious sacrifice of herself upon the
altar of the ancient faith buys her rum for at least two
days of the week at one of the neighborhood " morgues."

PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS.

249

She lives through the other four by begging. There are
distilleries in Jew town, or just across its borders, that de-
pend almost wholly on her custom. Recently, when one
in Hester Street was raided because the neighbors had
complained of the boisterous hilarity of the hags over
their beer, thirty two aged "scrubs" were marched off to
the station-house.

It is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset in
a review of the nationalities that go to make up this squad
of street beggars. The Irish head the list with fifteen per
cent., and the native American is only a little way behind
with twelve per cent., while the Italian, who in his own
country turns beggary into a fine art, has less than two per
cent. Eight per cent, were Germans. The relative prev-
alence of the races in our population does not account for
this showing. Various causes operate, no doubt, to pro-
duce it. Chief among them is, I think, the tenement
itself. It has no power to corrupt the Italian, who comes
here in almost every instance to work — no beggar would
ever emigrate from anywhere unless forced to do so. He
is distinctly on its lowest level from the start. With the
Irishman the case is different. The tenement, especially
its lowest type, appears to possess a peculiar affinity for
the worse nature of the Celt, to whose best and strongest
instincts it does violence, and soonest and most thoroughly
corrupts him. The " native " twelve per cent, represent
the result of this process, the hereditary beggar of the
second or third generation in the slums.

The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York's
streets, because the authorities do not know what else to
do with him. There is no provision for him anywhere
after he is old enough to strike out for himself. The an-
nual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives

250

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor ;
for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling
pencils on the street corners must provide. Until the
city affords him some systematic way of earning his living
by work (as Philadelphia has done, for instance) to banish
him from the street would be tantamount to sentencing him
to death by starvation. So he possesses it in peace, that
is, if he is blind in good earnest, and begs without " en-
cumbrance." Professional mendicancy does not hesitate
to make use of the greatest of human afflictions as a pre-
tence for enlisting the sympathy upon which it thrives.
Many New Yorkers will remember the French school-
master who was " blinded by a shell at the siege of Paris,"
but miraculously recovered his sight when arrested and
deprived of his children by the officers of Mr. Gerry's
society. When last heard of he kept a " museum " in
Hartford, and acted the overseer with financial success.
His sign with its pitiful tale, that was a familiar sight in
our streets for years and earned for him the capital upon
which he started his business, might have found a place
among the curiosities exhibited there, had it not been
kept in a different sort of museum here as a memento of
his rascality. There was another of his tribe, a woman,
who begged for years with a deformed child in her arms,
which she was found to have hired at an almshouse in Ge-
noa for fifteen francs a month. It was a good investment,
for she proved to be possessed of a comfortable fortune.
Some time before that, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, that found her out, had broken up
the dreadful padrone system, a real slave trade in Italian
children, who were bought of poor parents across the sea
and made to beg their way on foot through France to the
port whence they were shipped to this city, to be beaten

PAUPEEISM IN THE TENEMENTS. 251

and starved here by their cruel masters and sent out to
beg, often after merciless mutilation to make them " take "
better with a pitying public.

But, after all, the tenement offers a better chance of
fraud on impulsive but thoughtless charity, than all the
wretchedness of the street, and with fewer risks. To the
tender-hearted and unwary it is, in itself, the strongest plea
for help. When such a cry goes up as was heard recent-
ly from a Mott Street den, where the family of a "sick"
husband, a despairing mother, and half a dozen children
in rags and dirt were destitute of the " first necessities of
life," it is not to be wondered at that a stream of gold comes
pouring in to relieve. It happens too often, as in that
case, that a little critical inquiry or reference to the " black
list" of the Charity Organization Society, justly dreaded
only by the frauds, discovers the " sickness" to stand for
laziness, and the destitution to be the family's stock in
trade ; and the community receives a shock that for once
is downright wholesome, if it imposes a check on an un-
discrimiiiHting charity that is worse than none at all.

The case referred to furnished an apt illustration of
how thoroughly corrupting pauperism is in such a setting.
The tenement woke up early to the gold mine that was
being worked tinder its roof, and before, the day was three
hours old the stream of callers who responded to the news-
paper appeal found the alley blocked by a couple of
" toughs," who exacted toll of a silver quarter from each
tearful sympathizer with the misery in the attic.

A volume might be written about the tricks of the pro-
fessional beo-o-ar, and the uses to which he turns the tene-
ment in his trade. The Boston " widow " whose husband
turned up alive and well after she had buried him seven-
teen times with tears and lamentation, and made the pub-

252

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

lie pay for the weekly funerals, is not without representa-
tives in New York. The " gentleman tramp " is a famil-
iar type from our streets, and the " once respectable
Methodist " who patronized all the revivals in town with
his profitable story of repentance, only to fall from grace
into the saloon door nearest the church after the service

COFFEE AT ONE CENT.

was over, merely transferred the scene of his operations
from the tenement to the church as the proper setting for
his specialty. There is enough of real suffering in the
homes of the poor to make one wish that there were some
effective way of enforcing Paul's plan of starving the drones
into the paths of self-support : no work, nothing to eat.
The message came from one of the Health Depart-

PAUPERISM IX THE TENEMENTS.

253

inent's summer doctors, last July, to the King's Daugh-
ters' Tenement-house Committee, that a family with a
sick child was absolutely famishing in an uptown tene-
ment. The address was not given. The doctor had
forgotten to write it down, and before he could be found
and a visitor sent to the house the baby was dead, and
the mother had gone mad. The nurse found the father,
who was an honest laborer long out of work, pack-
ing the little corpse in an orange-box partly filled with
straw, that he might take it to the Morgue for pauper
burial. There was absolutely not a crust to eat in the
house, and the other children were crying for food.
The great immediate need in that case, as in more than
half of all according to the record, was work and liv-
ing wages. Alms do not meet the emergency at all.
They frequently aggravate it, degrading and pauperiz-
ing where true help should aim at raising the sufferer
to self-respect and self-dependence. The experience of
the Charity Organization Society in raising, in eight
years, 4,.r>00 families out of the rut of pauperism into
proud, if modest, independence, without alms, but by
a system of " friendly visitation," and the work of the
Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor and
kindred organizations along the same line, shows what
can be done by well-directed effort. It is estimated that
New York spends in public and private charity every
year a round $8, 000,000. A small part of this sum in-
telligently invested in a great labor bureau, that would
brino; the seeker of work and the one with work to o-ive
together under auspices offering some degree of mutual
security, would certainly repay the amount of the invest-
ment in the saving of much capital now worse than
wasted, and would be prolific of the best results. The

254

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

ultimate and greatest need, however, the real remedy, is
to remove the cause — the tenement that was built for " a
class of whom nothing was expected," and which has come
fully up to the expectation. Tenement-house reform
holds the key to the problem of pauperism in the city.
We can never get rid of either the tenement or the pau-
per. The two will always exist together in New York.
But by reforming the one, we can do more toward exter-
minating the other than can be done by all other means
together that have yet been invented, or ever will be.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE.

PAUPERDOM is to blame for the unjust yoking of
poverty with punishment, " charities" with "correc-
tion,'' in our municipal ministering to the needs of the
Nether Half. The shadow of the workhouse points like
a scornful finger toward its neighbor, the almshouse, when
the sun sets behind the teeming city across the East River,
as if, could its stones speak, it would say before night
drops its black curtain between them : " You and I are
brothers. I am not more bankrupt in moral purpose than
you. A common parent begat us. Twin breasts, the ten-
ement and the saloon, nourished us. Vice and unthrift
go hand in hand. Pauper, behold thy brother ! " And
the almshouse owns the bitter relationship in silence.

Over on the islands that lie strung along the river and
far up the Sound the Nether Half hides its deformity, ex-
cept on show-days, when distinguished visitors have to be
entertained and the sore is uncovered by the authorities
with due municipal pride in the exhibit. I shall spare
the reader the sight. The aim of these pages has been to
lay bare its source. But a brief glance at our proscribed
population is needed to give background and tone to the
picture. The review begins with the Charity Hospital
with its thousand helpless human wrecks ; takes in the
penitentiary, where the "tough "from Battle Row and

256

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Poverty Gap is made to earn behind stone walls the living
the world owes him ; a thoughtless, jolly convict-band with
opportunity at last " to think " behind the iron bars, but
little desire to improve it ; governed like unruly boys,
which in fact most of them are. Three of them were
taken from the dinner-table while I was there one day,
for sticking pins into each other, and were set with their
faces to the wall in sight of six hundred of their comrades
for punishment. Pleading incessantly for tobacco, when
the keeper's back is turned, as the next best thing to the
whiskey they cannot get, though they can plainly make
out the saloon-signs across the stream where they robbed
or " slugged " their way to prison. Every once in a while
the longing gets the best of some prisoner from the peni-
tentiary or the workhouse, and he risks his life in the swift
currents to reach the goal that tantilizes him with the
promise of " just one more drunk." The chances are at
least even of his being run down by some passing steamer
and drowned, even if he is not overtaken by the armed
guards who patrol the shore in boats, or his strength does
not give out.

This workhouse comes next, with the broken-down
hordes from the dives, the lodging-houses, and the tramps'
nests, the " hell-box" * rather than the repair-shop of the
city. In 1SS9 the registry at the workhouse footed up
22,477, of whom some had been there as many as twenty
times before. It is the popular summer resort of the
slums, but business is brisk at this stand the year round.
Not a few of its patrons drift back periodically without
the formality of a commitment, to take their chances on
the island when there is no escape from the alternative of

* In printing-offices the broken, worn-out, and useless type is thrown
into the " hell-box," to be recast at the foundry.

THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE.

work in the city. Work, but not too much work, is the
motto of the establishment. The " workhouse step " is
an institution that must be observed on the island, in order
to draw any comparison between it and the snail's pace
that shall do justice to the snail. Xature and man's art
have made these islands beautiful ; but weeds grow lux-
uriantly in their gardens, and spiders spin their cobwebs
unmolested in the borders of sweet-smelling box. The
work which two score of hired men could do well is too
much for these thousands.

Rows of old women, some smoking stumpy, black clay-
pipes, others knitting or idling, all grumbling, sit or stand
under the trees that hedge in the almshouse, or limp
about in the sunshine, leaning on crutches or bean-pole
staffs. They are a " growler-gang " of another sort than
may be seen in session on the rocks of the opposite shore
at that very moment. They grumble and growl from
sunrise to sunset, at the weather, the breakfast, the din-
ner, the supper ; at pork and beans as at corned beef and
cabbage ; at their Thanksgiving dinner as at the half ra-
tions of the sick ward ; at the past that had no joy, at the
present whose comfort they deny, and at the future with-
out promise. The crusty old men in the next building;
are not a circumstance to them. The warden, who was iiu
charge of the almshouse for many years, had become so
snappish and profane by constant association with a thou-
sand cross old women that I approached him with some
misgivings, to request his permission to " take " a group
of a hundred or so who were within shot of my camera.
He misunderstood me.

" Take them ? " he yelled. " Take the thousand of

them and be welcome. They will never be still, by ,.

till they are sent up on Hart's Island in a box, and I'll be
17

258

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

blamed if I don't think they will growl then at the style
of the funeral."

And he threw his arms around me in an outburst of
enthusiasm over the wondrous good luck that had sent a
friend indeed to his door. I felt it to be a painful duty
to undeceive him. When I told him that I simply wanted
the old women's picture, he turned away in speechless
disgust, and to his dying day, I have no doubt, remem-
bered my call as the day of the champion fool's visit to
the island.

When it is known that many of these old people have
been sent to the almshouse to die by their heartless chil-
dren, for whom they had worked faithfully as long as
they were able, their growling and discontent is not hard
to understand. Bitter poverty threw them all "on the
county," often on the wTrong county at that. "Very many
of them are old-country poor, sent, there is reason to be-
lieve, to America by the authorities to get rid of the
obligation to support them. " The almshouse," wrote a
good missionary, " affords a sad illustration of St. Paul's
description of the ' last days.' The class from which comes
our poorhouse population is to a large extent 6 without natu-
ral affection.' " I was reminded by his words of what my
friend, the doctor, had said to me a little while before :
u Many a mother has told me at her child's death-bed, ' I
-cannot afford to lose it. It costs too much to bury it.'
And when the little one did die there wras no time for the
mother's grief. The question crowded on at once, ' where
shall the money come from ? ' ^Natural feelings and af-
fections are smothered in the tenements." The doctor's
experience furnished a sadly appropriate text for the
priest's sermon.

Pitiful as these are, sights and sounds infinitely more

THE WEECKS AND THE WASTE.

259

saddening await us beyond the gate that shuts this world
of woe off from one whence the light of hope and reason
have gone out together. The shuffling of many feet on
the macadamized roads heralds the approach of a host of
women, hundreds upon hundreds— beyond the turn in the
road they still keep coming, marching with the faltering
step, the unseeing look and the incessant, senseless chatter
that betrays the darkened mind. The lunatic women of
the BlackwelFs Island Asylum are taking their afternoon
walk. Beyond, on the wide lawn, moves another still
stranger procession, a file of women in the asylum dress
of dull gray, hitched to a queer little wagon that, with its
gaudy adornments, suggests a cross between a baby-car-
riage and a circus-chariot. One crazy woman is strapped
in the seat ; forty tug at the rope to which they are se-
curely bound. This is the " chain-gang," so called once
in scoffing ignorance of the humane purpose the contriv-
ance serves. These are the patients afflicted with suicidal
mania, who cannot be trusted at large for a moment writh
the river i:\ sight, yet must have their daily walk as a
necessary part of their treatment. So this wagon was in-
vented by a clever doctor to afford them at once exercise
and amusement. A merry-go-round in the grounds sug-
gests a variation of this scheme. Ghastly suggestion of
mirth, with that stricken host advancing on its aimless
journey! As we stop to see it pass, the plaintive strains
of a familiar song float through a barred window in the
gray stone building. The voice is sweet, but inexpressibly

sad: "Oh, how my heart grows weary, far from "

The song breaks oft' suddenly in a low, troubled laugh.

She has forgotten, forgotten . A woman in the ranks,

whose head has been turned toward the window, throws
up her hands with a scream. The rest stir uneasily.

260

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

The nurse is by her side in an instant with words half
soothing, half stern. A messenger comes in haste from
the asylum to ask us not to stop. Strangers may not
linger where the patients pass. It is apt to excite them.
As we go in with him the human file is passing yet, quiet
restored. The troubled voice of the unseen singer still
gropes vainly among the lost memories of the past for the
missing key : " Oh ! how my heart grows weary, far

from "

" Who is she, doctor ? "

"Hopeless case. She will never see home again."

An average of seventeen hundred women this asylum
harbors ; the asylum for men up on Ward's Island even
more. Altogether 1,419 patients were admitted to the
city asylums for the insane in 1889, and at the end of
the year 4,913 remained in them. There is a constant
ominous increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that
are thrown on the city's charity. Quite two hundred are
added year by year, and the asylums were long since so
overcrowded that a great " farm " had to be established
on Long Island to receive the surplus. The strain of our
hurried, over-worked life has something to do with this.
Poverty ha? more. For these are all of the poor. It is the
harvest of sixty and a hundred-fold, the " fearful rolling
up and rolling down from generation to generation, through
all the ages, of the weakness, vice, and moral darkness of
the past." * The curse of the island haunts all that come
once within its reach. " No man or woman," says Dr.
Louis L. Seaman, who speaks from many years' experience
in a position that gave him full opportunity to observe the

* Dr. Louis L. Seaman, late chief of staff of the Blackwell's Island
hospitals: " Social Waste of a Great City,'' read before the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, 1886.

THE WKECKS AXD THE WASTE.

261

facts, " who is £ sent up ' to these colonies ever returns to
the city scot-free. There is a lien, visible or hidden, upon
his or her present or future, which too often proves
stronger than the best purposes and fairest opportunities
of social rehabilitation. The under world holds in ri<>--
orous bondage every unfortunate or miscreant who has
once 4 served time.' There is often tragic interest in
the struggles of the ensnared wretches to break away from
the meshes spun about them. But the maelstrom has no
bowels of mercy ; and the would-be fugitives are flung
back again and again into the devouring whirlpool of
crime and poverty, until the end is reached on the dissect-
ing-table, or in the Potters Field. What can the moralist
or scientist do by "way of resuscitation ? Very little at
best. The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and frag-
ments of wasted lives. Such a ministry must begin at
the sources — is necessarily prophylactic, nutritive, educa-
tional. On these islands there are no flexible twigs, only
gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks, insensible to moral or
social influences."

Sad words, but true. The commonest keeper soon
learns to pick out almost at sight the "cases" that will
leave the penitentiary, the workhouse, the almshouse,
only to return again and again, each time more hopeless,
to spend their wasted lives in the bondage of the island.

The alcoholic cells in Bellevue Hospital are a way-sta-
tion for a goodly share of them on their journeys back
and forth across the East River. Last year they held al-
together 3,691 prisoners, considerably more than one-
fourth of the whole number of 13,813 patients that went
in through the hospital gates. The daily average of
" cases " in this, the hospital of the poor, is over six hun-
dred. The average daily census of all the prisons, hospi-

262

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

tals, workhouses, and asylums in the charge of the De-
partment of Charities and Correction last year was about
14,000, and about one employee was required for every ten
of this army to keep its machinery running smoothly.
The total number admitted in 1889 to all the jails and in-
stitutions in the city and on the islands was 138,332. To
the almshouse alone 38,600 were admitted ; 9,765 were
there to start the new year with, and 553 were born with
the dark shadow of the poorhouse overhanging their
lives, making a total of 48, 918. In the care of all their
wards the commissioners expended $2,343,372. The ap-
propriation for the police force in 1889 was $4,409,550.-
94, and for the criminal courts and their machinery $403,-
190. Thus the first cost of maintaining our standing army
of paupers, criminals, and sick poor, by direct taxation, was
last year $7,156,112.94.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE.

A MAN stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and
Fourteenth Street the other day, looking gloomily
at the carriages that rolled by, carrying the wealth and
fashion of the avenues to and from the big stores down
town. He was poor, and hungry, and ragged. This
thought was in his mind : u They behind their well-fed
teams have no thought for the morrow ; they know hun-
ger only by name, and ride down to spend in an hour's
shopping what would keep me and my little ones from
want a whole year." There rose up before him the pict-
ure of those little ones crying for bread around the cold
and cheerless hearth — then he sprang into the throng and
slashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to
revenge.

The man was arrested, of course, and locked up. To-
day he is probably in a mad-house, forgotten. And the
carriages roll by to and from the big stores with their
gay throng of shoppers. The world forgets easily, too
easily, what it does not like to remember.

Nevertheless the man and his knife had a mission.
They spoke in their ignorant, impatient way the warning
one of the most conservative, dispassionate of public
bodies had sounded only a little while before : " Our only
fear is that reform may come in a burst of public indig-

26-4

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

nation destructive to property and to good morals." *
They represented one solution of the problem of ignor-
ant poverty versus ignorant wealth that has come down
to us unsolved, the danger-cry of which we have lately
heard in the shout that never should have been raised
on American soil — the shout of " the masses against the
classes " — the solution of violence.

There is another solution, that of justice. The choice
is between the two. "Which shall it be ?

" Well ! " say some well-meaning people ; " we don't see
the need of putting it in that way. We have been down
among the tenements, looked them over. There are a
good many people there ; they are not comfortable, per-
haps. What would you have ? They are poor. And
their houses are not such hovels as we have seen and read
of in the slums of the Old World. They are decent in
comparison. Why, some of them have brown-stone
fronts. You will own at least that they make a decent
show."

Yes ! that is true. The worst tenements in Xew York
■do not, as a rule, look bad. Xeither Hell's Kitchen, nor
Murderers' Bow bears its true character stamped on the
front. They are not quite old enough, perhaps. The
same is true of their tenants. The Xew York tough may
be ready to kill where his London brother would do little
more than scowl ; yet, as a general thing he is less re-
pulsively brutal in looks. Here again the reason may be
the same : the breed is not so old. A few generations
more in the shafts, and all that will be changed. To get
at the pregnant facts of tenement-house life one must look
beneath the surface. Many an apple has a fair skin and a

* Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor. 1887.

THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE.

265

rotten core. There is a much better argument for the
tenements in the assurance of the Registrar of Yital
Statistics that the death-rate of these houses has of late
been brought below the general death-rate of the city, and
that it is lowest in the biggest houses. This means two
things : one, that the almost exclusive attention given to
the tenements by the sanitary authorities in twenty years
has borne some fruit, and that the newer tenements are
better than the old — there is some hope in that ; the other,
that the whole strain of tenement-house dwellers has been
bred down to the conditions under which it exists, that
the struggle with corruption lias begotten the power to
resist it. This is a familiar law of nature, necessary to
its first and strongest impulse of self-preservation. To a
certain extent, we are all creatures of the conditions that
surround us, physically and morally. But is the knowl-
edge reassuring? In the light of what we have seen, does
not the question arise : what sort of creature, then, this
of the tenement? I tried to draw his likeness from ob-
servation in telling the story of the tough." Has it
nothing to suggest the man with the knife ?

I will o-o further. I am not willing even to admit it to
be an unqualified advantage that ourXew York tenements
have less of the slum look than those. of older cities. It
helps to delay the recognition of their true character on
the part of the well-meaning, but uninstructed, who are
always in the majority.

The " dangerous classes " of K~ew York long ago com-
pelled recognition. They are dangerous less because of
their own crimes than because of the criminal ignorance
of those who are not of their kind. The danger to society
comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from
the ill-spent wealth that reared them, that it might earn a

266

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

usurious interest from a class- from which " nothing else
was expected.'' That was the broad foundation laid
down, and the edifice built upon it corresponds to the
groundwork. That this is well understood on the "un-
safe " side of the line that separates the rich from the
poor, much better than by those who have all the advan-
tages of discriminating education, is good cause for dis-
quietude. In it a keen foresight may again dimly discern
the shadow of the man with the knife.

Two years ago a great meeting was held at Chickering
Hall — I have spoken of it before — a meeting that dis-
cussed for days and nights the question how to banish
this spectre ; how to lay hold with good influences of this
enormous mass of more than a million people, who were
drifting away faster and faster from the safe moorings
of the old faith. Clergymen and laymen from all the
Protestant denominations took part in the discussion ; nor
was a good word forgotten for the brethren of the other
great Christian fold who labor among the poor. Much
was said that was good and true, and ways were found of
reaching the spiritual needs of the tenement population
that promise success. But at no time throughout the con-
ference was the real key-note of the situation so boldly
struck as has been done by a few far-seeing business
men, who had listened to the cry of that Christian builder :
" How shall the love of God be understood by those who
have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man ? "
Their practical programme of " Philanthropy and five
per cent." has oet examples in tenement building that
show, though they are yet few and scattered, what may
in time be accomplished even with such poor opportu-
nities as New York offers to-day of undoing the old
wrong. This is the gospel of justice, the solution that

THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE.

267

must be sought as the one alternative to the man with
the knife.

"Are you not looking too much to the material condi-
tion of these people," said a good minister to me after a
lecture in a Harlem church last winter, " and forgetting
the inner man?" I told him, "2\o! for you cannot
expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst
tenement-house surroundings. You must first put the
man where he can respect himself. To reverse the argu-
ment of the apple : you cannot expect to find a sound
core in a rotten fruit."

CHAPTER XXIV.

WHAT HAS BEEN DOXE.

IX twenty years what has been done in Xew York to
solve the tenement-house problem ?
The law has done what it could. That was not always
a great deal, seldom more than barely sufficient for the
moment. An aroused municipal conscience endowed the
Health Department with almost autocratic powers in
dealing with this subject, but the desire to educate rather
than force the community into a better way dictated their
exercise with a slow conservatism that did not always
seem wise to the impatient reformer. Xew York has its
St. Antoine, and it has often sadly missed a Xapoleon III.
to clean up and make light in the dark corners. The ob-
stacles, too, have been many and great. Xevertheless the
authorities have not been idle, though it is a grave ques-
tion whether all the improvements made under the sani-
tary regulations of recent years deserve the name. Tene-
ments quite as bad as the worst are too numerous yet ;
but one tremendous factor for evil in the lives of the
poor has been taken by the throat, and something has
unquestionably been done, where that was possible, to
lift those lives out of the rut where they were equally
beyond the reach of hope and of ambition. It is no
longer lawful to construct barracks to cover the whole of
a lot. Air and sunlight have a legal claim, and the day
of rear tenements is past. Two years ago a hundred

WHAT HAS BEE2T DOXE.

269

thousand people burrowed in these inhuman dens; but
some have been torn down since. Their number will
decrease steadily until they
shall have become a bad tra-
dition of a heedless past.
The dark, unventilated bed-
room is going with them, and

29-ft-

Old Style Tenement.

Single Lot Tenement of To-day.

EVOLUTION OF THE TENEMENT IN TWENTT TEARS.

the open sewer. The day is at hand when the greatest
of all evils that now curse life in the tenements — the
dearth of water in the hot summer days — will also have

270

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

been remedied, and a long step taken toward the moral
and physical redemption of their tenants.

Public sentiment has done something also, but very
far from enough. As a rule, it has slumbered peacefully
until some flagrant outrage on decency and the health of
the community aroused it to noisy but ephemeral indigna-
tion, or until a dreaded epidemic knocked at our door.
It is this unsteadiness of purpose that has been to a large
extent responsible for the apparent lagging of the author-
ities in cases not involving immediate danger to the gen-
eral health. The law needs a much stronger and readier
backing of a thoroughly enlightened public sentiment to
make it as effective as it might be made. It is to be re-
membered that the health officers, in dealing with this
subject of dangerous houses, are constantly trenching upon
what each landlord considers his private rights, for which
he is ready and bound to fight to the last. Nothing short
of the strongest pressure will avail to convince him that
these individual rights are to be surrendered for the clear
benefit of the whole. It is easy enough to convince a man
that he ought not to harbor the thief who steals people's
property ; but to make him see that he has no right to
slowly kill his neighbors, or his tenants, by making a
death-trap of his house, seems to be the hardest of all
tasks. It is apparently the slowness of the process that
obscures his mental sight. The man who will fight an
order to repair the plumbing in his house through every
court he can reach, would suffer tortures rather than shed
the blood of a fellow-man by actual violence. Clearly, it
is a matter of education on the part of the landlord no
less than the tenant.

In spite of this, the landlord has done his share ; chief-
ly perhaps by yielding — not always gracefully — when it

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE.

271

was no longer of any use to fight. There have been ex-
ceptions, however : men and women who have mended
and built with an eve to the real welfare of their tenants
as well as to their own pockets. Let it be well understood
that the two are inseparable, if any good is to come of it.
The business of housing the poor, if it is to amount to
anything, must be business, as it was business with our
fathers to put them where they are. As charity, pastime,
or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.
This is an inexorable rule, now thoroughly well under-
stood in England and continental Europe, and by all who
have given the matter serious thought here. Call it po-
etic justice, or divine justice, or anything else, it is a hard
fact, not to be gotten over. Upon any other plan than
the assumption that the workman has a just claim to a
decent home, and the right to demand it, any scheme for
his relief fails. It must be a fair exchange of the man's
money for what he can afford to buy at a reasonable
price. Any charity scheme merely turns him into a pau-
per, however it may be disguised, and drowns him hope-
lessly in the mire out of which it proposed to pull him.
And this principle must pervade the whole plan. Expert
management of model tenements succeeds where ama-
teur management, with the best intentions, gives up the
task, discouraged, as a flat failure. Some of the best-con-
ceived enterprises, backed by abundant capital and good-
will, have been wrecked on this rock. Sentiment, having
prompted the effort, forgot to stand aside and let business
make it.

Business, in a wider sense, has done more than all other
agencies together to wipe out the worst tenements. It has
been New York's real Napoleon III., from whose decree
there was no appeal. In ten years I have seen plague-

272

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

spots disappear before its onward march, with which
health officers, police, and sanitary science had struggled
vainly since such struggling began as a serious business.
And the process goes on still. Unfortunately, the crowd-
ing in some of the most densely packed quarters down
town has made the property there so valuable, that relief
from this source is less confidently to be expected, at all
events in the near future. Still, their time may come
also. It comes so quickly sometimes as to fairly take
one's breath away. More than once I have returned, after
a few brief weeks, to some specimen rookery in which I
was interested, to find it gone and an army of workmen
delving twenty feet underground to lay the foundation of
a mighty warehouse. That was the case with the " Big
Flat " in Mott Street. I had not had occasion to visit it
for several months last winter, and when I went there,
entirely unprepared for a change, I could not find it. It
had always been conspicuous enough in the landscape be-
fore, and I marvelled much at my own stupidity until, by
examining the number of the house, I found out that I
had gone right. It was the " flat " that had disappeared.
In its place towered a six-story carriage factory with busi-
ness going on on every floor, as if it had been there for
years and years.

This same 'v Big Flat " furnished a good illustration of
why some well-meant efforts in tenement building have
failed. Like Gotham Court, it was originally built as a
model tenement, but speedily came to rival the Court in
foulness. It became a regular hot-bed of thieves and
peace-breakers, and made no end of trouble for the police.
The immediate reason, outside of the lack of proper su-
pervision, was that it had open access to two streets in
a neighborhood where thieves and " toughs " abounded.

WHAT HAS BEEX DOXE.

273

These took advantage of an arrangement that had been
supposed by the builders to be a real advantage as a
means of ventilation, and their occupancy drove honest
folk away. Murderers' Alley, of which I have spoken
elsewhere, and the sanitary inspector's experiment with
building a brick wall athwart it to shut off travel through
the block, is a parallel case.

The causes that operate to obstruct efforts to better
the lot of the tenement population are, in our day, large
ly found among the tenants themselves. This is true
particularly of the poorest. They are shiftless, destruc-
tive, and stupid ; in a word, they are what the tene-
ments have made them. It is a dreary old truth that
those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to
do it. It must be confessed that there is little enough in
their past experience to inspire confidence in the sincerity
of the effort to help them. I recall the discomfiture of a
certain well-known philanthropist, since deceased, whose
heart beat responsive to other suffering than that of hu-
man kind. lie was a large owner of tenement property,
and once undertook* to fit out his houses with stationary
tubs, sanitary plumbing, wood-closets, and all the latest
improvements. lie introduced his rough tenants to all
this magnificence without taking the precaution of pro-
viding a competent housekeeper, to see that the new ac-
quaintances got on together. lie felt' that his tenants,
ought to be grateful for the interest he took in them..
They were. They found the boards in the wood-closets
fine kindling wood, while the pipes and faucets were as
good as cash at the junk shop. In three months the
owner had to remove what was left of his improvements.
The pipes were cut and the houses running full of water,
the stationary tubs were put to all sorts of uses except
13

274 HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

washing, and of the wood-closets not a trace was left.
The philanthropist was ever after a firm believer in the
total depravity of tenement-house people. Others have
been led to like reasoning by as plausible arguments, with-
out discovering that the shiftlessness and ignorance that
offended them were the consistent crop of the tenement
they were trying to reform, and had to be included in the
effort. The owners of a block of model tenements up-
town had got their tenants comfortably settled, and were
indulging in high hopes of their redemption under proper
management, when a contractor ran up a row of " skin "
tenements, shaky but fair to look at, with brown-stone
trimmings and gewgaws. The result was to tempt a lot
of the well-housed tenants away. It was a very astonish-
ing instance of perversity to the planners of the benevo-
lent scheme ; but, after all, there was nothing strange in it.
It is all a matter of education, as I said about the landlord.

That the education comes slowly need excite no sur-
prise. The forces on the other side are ever active. The
faculty of the tenement for appropriating to itself every
foul thing that comes within its reach, and piling up and
intensifying its corruption until out of all proportion to
the beginning, is something marvellous. Drop a case of
scarlet fever, of measles, or of diphtheria into one of these
barracks, and, unless it is caught at the very start and
stamped out, the contagion of the one case will sweep
block after block, and half people a graveyard. Let the
police break up a vile dive, goaded by the angry protests
of the neighborhood — forthwith the outcasts set in circu-
lation by the vaid betake themselves to the tenements,
where in their hired rooms, safe from interference, they
set up as many independent centres of contagion, infinite-
ly more destructive, each and every one, than was the

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE.

275

known dive before. I am not willing to affirm that this
is the police reason for letting so many of the dives alone ;
but it might well be. They are perfectly familiar with
the process, and entirely helpless to prevent it.

This faculty, as inherent in the problem itself — the pro-
digious increase of the tenement-house population that
goes on without cessation, and its consequent greater
crowding — is the chief obstacle to its solution. In 1S69
there were 14,S72 tenements in Xew York, with a popu-
lation of 468,492 persons. In 1879 the number of the
tenements was estimated at 21,000, and their tenants had
passed the half-million mark. At the end of the year
1S88, when a regular census was made for the first time
since 1869, the showing was : 32,390 tenements, with a
population of 1,093,701 souls. To-day we have 37,316
tenements, including 2,630 rear houses, and their popula-
tion is over 1,250,000. A large share of this added popu-
lation, especially of that which came to us from abroad,
crowds in below Fourteenth Street, where the population
is already packed beyond reason, and confounds all at-
tempts to make matters better there. At the same time
new slums are constantly growing up uptown, and have to
be kept down with a firm hand. This drift of the popu-
lation to the great cities has to be taken into account as a
steady factor. It will probably increase rather than de-
crease for many years to come. At the beginning of the
century the percentage of our population that lived in
cities was as one in twenty -five. In 1880 it was one in
four and one-half, and in 1S90 the census will in all prob-
ability show it to be one in four. Against such tenden-
cies, in the absence of suburban outlets for the crowding
masses, all remedial measures must prove more or less
ineffective. The "confident belief" expressed by the

276

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

Board of Health in 1874, that rapid transit would solve
the problem, is now known to have been a vain hope.

Workingmen, in New York at all events, will live near
their work, no matter at what sacrifice of comfort — one
might almost say at whatever cost, and the city will never
be less crowded than it is. To distribute the crowds as
evenly as possible is the effort of the authorities, where
nothing better can be done. In the first six months of
the present year 1,068 persons were turned out of not quite
two hundred tenements below Houston Street by the
sanitary police on their midnight inspections, and this
covered only a very small part of that field. The uptown
tenements were practically left to take care of themselves
in this respect.

The quick change of economic conditions in the city that
often out-paces all plans of relief, rendering useless to-day
what met the demands of the situation well enough yes-
terday, is another cause of perplexity. A common obstacle
also — I am inclined to think quite as common as in Ire-
land, though we hear less of it in the newspapers — is the
absentee landlord. The home article, who fights for his
rights, as he chooses to consider them, is bad enough ;
but the absentee landlord is responsible for no end of
trouble. He was one of the first obstructions the sanitary
reformers stumbled over, when the Health Department
took hold. It reported in 1869 that many of the tenants
were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to
their requests to have the houses put in order was an in-
vitation to pay their rent or get out. " Inquiry often dis-
closed the fajt that the owner of the property was a
wealthy gentleman or lady, either living in an aristocratic
part of the city, or in a neighboring city, or, as was occa-
sionally found to be the case, in Europe. The property is

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE.

277

usually managed entirely by an agent, whose instructions
are simple but emphatic: Collect the rent in advance,
or, failing, eject the occupants/' The Committee having
the matter in charge proposed to compel owners of tene-
ments with ten families or more to put a housekeeper in
the house, who should be held responsible to the Health
Department. Unluckily the powers of the Board gave out
at that point, and the proposition was never acted upon.
Could it have been, much trouble would have been spared
the Health Board, and untold suffering the tenants in
many houses. The tribe of absentee landlords is by no
means extinct in New York. Xot a few who fled from
across the sea to avoid being crushed by his heel there
have groaned under it here, scarcely profiting by the ex-
change. Sometimes — it can hardly be said in extenua-
tion— the heel that crunches is applied in saddening ig-
norance. I recall the angry indignation of one of these
absentee landlords, a worthy man who, living faraway in
the country, had inherited city property, when he saw the
condition of his slum tenements. The man was shocked
beyond expression, all the more because he did not know
whom to blame except himself for the state of things that
had aroused his wrath, and yet, conscious of the integrity
of his intentions, felt that he should not justly be held
responsible.

The experience of this landlord points directly to the
remedy which the law failed to supply to the early re-
formers. It has since been fully demonstrated that a com-
petent agent on the premises, a man of the best and the
highest stamp, who knows how to instruct and guide with
a firm hand, is a prerequisite to the success of any reform
tenement scheme. This is a plain business proposition,
that has been proved entirely sound in some notable in-

278

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

stances of tenement building, of which more hereafter.
Even among the poorer tenements, those are always the
best in which the owner himself lives. It is a hopeful
sign in any case. The difficulty of procuring such assist-
ance without having to pay a ruinous price, is one of the
obstructions that have vexed in this city efforts to solve the
problem of housing the poor properly, because it presup-
poses that the effort must be made on a larger scale than
has often been attempted.

The readiness with which the tenants respond to intelli-
gent efforts in their behalf, when made under fair condi-
tions, is as surprising as it is gratifying, and fully proves
the claim that tenants are only satisfied in filthy and un-
wholesome surroundings because nothing better is offered.
The moral effect is as great as the improvement of their
physical health. It is clearly discernible in the better
class of tenement dwellers to-day. The change in the
character of the colored population in the few years since
it began to move out of the wicked rookeries of the old
"Africa " to the decent tenements in Yorkville, furnishes
a notable illustration, and a still better one is found in the
contrast between the model tenement in the Mulberry
Street Bend and the barracks across the way, of which I
spoke in tho chapter devoted to the Italian. The Italian
himself is the strongest argument of all. With his fatal con-
tentment in the filthiest surroundings, he gives undoubted
evidence of having in him the instinct of cleanliness that,
properly cultivated, would work his rescue in a very little
while. It is a queer contradiction, but the fact is patent
to anyone who has observed the man in his home-life.
And he is not alone in this. I came across an instance,
tin's past summer, of how a refined, benevolent personal-
ity works like a leaven in even the roughest tenement-

WHAT HAS BEEX DOXE.

279

Louse crowd. This was no model tenement ; far from it.
It was a towering barrack in the Tenth Ward, sheltering
more than twenty families. All the light and air that en-
tered its interior came through an air-shaft two feet square,
upon which two bedrooms and the hall gave in every story.
In three years I had known of two domestic tragedies,
prompted by poverty and justifiable disgust with life, oc-
curring in the house, and had come to look upon it as a
typically bad tenement, quite beyond the pale of possible
improvement. What was my surprise, when chance led
me to it once more after a while, to find the character of
the occupants entirely changed. Some of the old ones
were there still, but they did not seem to be the same
people. I discovered the secret to be the new house-
keeper, a tidy, mild-mannered, but exceedingly strict little
body, who had a natural faculty of drawing her depraved
surroundings within the beneficent sphere of her strong,
sympathy, and withal of exacting respect for her orders.
The worst elements had been banished from the house in
short order under her management, and for the rest a new
era of self-respect had dawned. They were, as a body, as
vastly superior to the general run of their class as they
had before seemed below it. And this had been effected
in the short space of a single year.

My observations on this point are more than confirmed
by those of nearly all the practical tenement reformers I
have known, who have patiently held to the course they
had laid down. One of these, whose experience exceeds
that of all of the rest together, and whose influence for
good has been very great, said to me recently : a I hold
that not ten per cent, of the people now living in tenements
would refuse to avail themselves of the best improved con-
ditions offered, and come fully up to the use of them, prop-

280

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

erly instructed ; but they cannot get them. They are up
to them now, fully, if the chances were only offered. They
don't have to come up. It is all a gigantic mistake on the
part of the public, of which these poor people are the vic-
tims. I have built homes for more than five hundred fam-
ilies in fourteen years, and I have been getting daily more
faith in human nature from my work among the poor ten-
ants, though approaching that nature on a plane and under
conditions that could scarcely promise better for disap-
pointment." It is true that my friend has built his houses
in Brooklyn ; but human nature does not differ greatly on
the two shores of the East River. For those who think it
does, it may be well to remember that only five years ago
the Tenement House Commission summed up the situa-
tion in this city in the declaration that, "the condition of
the tenants is in advance of the houses which they oc-
cupy," quite the severest arraignment of the tenement
that had yet been uttered.

The many philanthropic efforts that have been made in
the last few years to render less intolerable the lot of the
tenants in the homes where many of them must continue
to live, have undoubtedly had their effect in creating a dis-
position to accept better things, that will make plainer
sailing for future builders of model tenements. In many
ways, as in the "College Settlement" of courageous girls,
the Neighborhood Guilds, through the efforts of the King's
Daughters, and numerous other schemes of practical mis-
sion work, the poor and the well-to-do have been brought
closer together, in an every-day companionship that cannot
but be productive of the best results, to the one who gives
no less than to the one who receives. And thus, as a good
lady wrote to me once, though the problem stands yet
unsolved, more perplexing than ever ; though the bright

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE.

281

spots in the dreary picture be too often bright only by
comparison, and many of the expedients hit upon for re-
lief sad makeshifts, we can dimly discern behind it all
that good is somehow working out of even this slough of
despond the while it is deepening and widening in our
sight, and in His own good season, if we labor on with
courage and patience, will bear fruit sixty and a hundred
fold.

CHAPTER XXY.

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

WHAT, then, are the bald facts with which we have
to deal in New York ?

I. That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of
wage-earners which it is our business to house decently.

II. That it is not housed decently.

III. That it must be so housed here for the present, and
for a long time to come, all schemes of suburban relief
being as yet Utopian, impracticable.

IV. That it pays high enough rents to entitle it to be
so housed, as a right.

Y. That nothing but our own slothf ulness is in the way
of so housing it, since " the condition of the tenants is in
advance of the condition of the houses which they occupy "
(Report of Tenement-house Commission).

YI. That the security of the one no less than of the
other half demands, on sanitary, moral, and economic
grounds, that it be decently housed.

YII. That it will pay to do it. As an investment, I
mean, and in hard cash. This I shall immediately pro-
ceed to prove.

YIII. That the tenement has come to stay, and must it-
self be the solution of the problem with which it confronts
us.

This is the fact from which we cannot get away, how-
ever we may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

283

get rid of it altogether ; but as we cannot, all argument
on that score may at this time be dismissed as idle. The
practical question is what to do with the tenement. I
watched a Mott Street landlord, the owner of a row of
barracks that have made no end of trouble for the health
authorities for twenty years, solve that question for him-
self the other day. His way was to give the wretched
pile a coat of paint, and put a gorgeous tin cornice on with
the year 1890 in letters a yard long. From where I stood
watching the operation, I looked down upon the same
dirty crowds camping on the roof, foremost among them
an Italian mother with two stark-naked children who had
apparently never made the acquaintance of a wash-tub.
That was a landlord's way, and will not get us out of the
mire.

The "flat" is another way that does not solve the prob-
lem. Rather, it extends it. The flat is not a model,
though it is a modern, tenement. It gets rid of some of
the nuisances of the low tenement, and of the worst of
them, the overcrowding — if it gets rid of them at all — at
a cost that takes it at once out of the catalogue of " homes
for the poor," while imposing some of the evils from
which they suffer upon those who ought to escape from
them.

There are three effective ways of dealing with the tene- '
ments in Xew York :

I. By law.

II. By remodelling and making the most out of the old
houses.

III. By building new, model tenements.

Private enterprise— conscience, to put it in the category
of duties, where it belongs— must do the lion's share un-
der these last two heads. Of what the law has effected I

284

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

have spoken already. The drastic measures adopted in
Paris, in Glasgow, and in London are not practicable here
on anything like as large a scale. Still it can, under
strong pressure of public opinion, rid us of the worst
plague-spots. The Mulberry Street Bend will go the way
of the Five Points when all the red tape that binds the
hands of municipal effort has been unwound. Prizes were
offered in public competition, some years ago, for the best i
plans of modern tenement-houses. It may be that we
shall see the day when the building of model tenements
will be encouraged by subsidies in the way of a rebate of
taxes. Meanwhile the arrest and summary punishment
of landlords, or their agents, who persistently violate law
and decency, will have a salutary effect. If a few of the
wealthy absentee landlords, who are the worst offenders,
could be got within the jurisdiction of the city, and by ar-
rest be compelled to employ proper overseers, it would be
a proud day for Xew York. To remedy the overcrowd-
ing, with which the night inspections of the sanitary
police cannot keep step, tenements may eventually have to
be licensed, as now the lodging-houses, to hold so many
tenants, and no more ; or the State may have to bring down
the rents that cause the crowding, by assuming the right
to regulate them is it regulates the fares on the elevated
roads. I throw out the suggestion, knowing quite well
that it is open to attack. It emanated originally from one
of the brightest minds that have had to struggle officially
with this tenement-house question in the. last ten years.
In any event, to succeed, reform by law must aim at mak-
ing it unprofitable to own a bad tenement. At best, it is
apt to travel at a snail's pace, while the enemy it pursues
is putting the best foot foremost.

In this matter of profit the law ought to have its strong-

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

285

est ally in the landlord himself, though the reverse is the
case. This condition of things I believe to rest on a mon-
strous error. It cannot be that tenement property that is
worth preserving at all can continue to yield larger returns,
if allowed to run down, than if properly cared for and kept
in good repair. The point must be reached, and soon, where
the cost of repairs, necessary with a house full of the lowest,
most ignorant tenants, must overbalance the saving of the
first few years of neglect ; for this class is everywhere the
most destructive, as well as the poorest paying. I have the
experience of owners, who have found this out to their
cost, to back me up in the assertion, even if it were not
the statement of a plain business fact that proves itself.
I, do not include tenement property that is deliberately
allowed to fall into decay because at some future time the
ground will be valuable for business or other purposes.
There is unfortunately enough of that kind in Xew York,
often leasehold property owned by wealthy estates or soul-
less corporations that oppose all their great influence to
the efforts of the law in behalf of their tenants.

There is abundant evidence, on the other hand, that it
can be made to pay to improve and make the most of the
worst tenement property, even in the most wretched lo-
cality. The example set by Miss Ellen Collins in her
Water Street houses will always stand as a decisive answer
to all doubts on this point. It is quite ten years since she
bought three old tenements at the corner of Water and
Roosevelt Streets, then as now one of the lowest localities
in the city. Since then she has leased three more adjoin-
ing her purchase, and so much of Water Street has at all
events been purified. Her first effort was to let in the
light in the hallways, and with the darkness disappeared,
as if by magic, the heaps of refuse that used to be piled

286

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

up beside the sinks. A few of the most refractory ten-
ants disappeared with them, but a very considerable pro-
portion stayed, conforming readily to the new rules, and
are there yet. It should here be stated that Miss Collins's
tenants are distinctly of the poorest. Her purpose was to
experiment with this class, and her experiment has been
more than satisfactory. Her plan was, as she puts it her-
self, fair play between tenant and landlord. To this end
the rents were put as low as consistent with the idea of a
business investment that must return a reasonable interest
to be successful. The houses were thoroughly refitted
with proper plumbing. A competent janitor was put in
charge to see that the rules were observed by the tenants,
when Miss Collins herself was not there. Of late years
she has had to give very little time to personal superintend-
ence, and the care-taker told me only the other day that
very little was needed. The houses seemed to run them-
selves in the groove once laid down. Once the reputed
haunt of thieves, they have become the most orderly
in the neighborhood. Clothes are left hanging; on the
lines all night with impunity, and the pretty flower-beds
in the yard where the children not only from the six houses,
but of the whole block, play, skip, and swing, are undis-
turbed. The tenants, by the way, provide the flowers
themselves in che spring, and take all the more pride in
them because they are their own. The six houses contain
forty-five families, and there " has never been any need of
putting up a bill." As to the income from the property,
Miss Collins said to me last August : " I have had six and
even six and three-quarters per cent, on the capital in-
vested ; on the whole, you may safely say five and a half
per cent. This I regard as entirely satisfactory." It
should be added that she has persistently refused to let the

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

287

corner-store, now occupied by a butcher, as a saloon; oi-
lier income from it might have been considerably in-
creased.

Miss Collius's experience is of value chiefly as showing
what can be accomplished with the worst possible mate-
rial, by the sort of personal interest in the poor that alone
will meet their real needs. All the charity in the world,
scattered with the most lavish hand, will not take its
place. "Fair play " between landlord and tenant is the
key, too long mislaid, that unlocks the door to success
everywhere as it did for Miss Collins. She has not lacked
imitators whose experience has been akin to her own.
The case of Gotham Court has been already cited. On
the other hand, instances are not wanting of landlords
who have undertaken the task, but have tired of it or
sold their property before it had been fully redeemed,
with the result that it relapsed into its former bad condi-
tion faster than it had improved, and the tenants with it.
I am inclined to think that such houses are liable to fall
even below the average level. Backsliding in brick and
mortar does not greatly differ from similar performances
in flesh and blood.

Backed by a strong and steady sentiment, such as these
pioneers have evinced, that would make it the personal
business of wealthy owners with time to spare to look
after their tenants, the law would be able in a very short
time to work a salutary transformation in the worst quar-
ters, to the lasting advantage, I am well persuaded, of the
landlord no less than the tenant. Unfortunately, it is in
this quality of personal effort that the sentiment of inter-
est in the poor, upon which we have to depend, is too
often lacking. People who are willing to give money feel
that that ought to be enough. It is not. The money

288

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

thus given is too apt to be wasted along with the senti-
ment that prompted the gift.

Even when it comes to the third of the ways I spoke of
as effective in dealing with the tenement-house problem,
the building of model structures, the personal interest in
the matter must form a large share of the capital in-
vested, if it is to yield full returns. Where that is the
case, there is even less doubt about its paying, with ordi-
nary business management, than in the case of reclaiming
an old building, which is, like putting life into a defunct
newspaper, pretty apt to be up-hill work. Model tene-
ment building has not been attempted in New York on
anything like as large a scale as in many other great cities,
and it is perhaps owing to this, in a measure, that a belief
prevails that it cannot succeed here. This is a wrong no-
tion entirely. The various undertakings of that sort that
have been made here under intelligent management have,
as far as I know, all been successful.

From the managers of the two best-known experiments
in model tenement building in the city, the Improved
Dwellings Association and the Tenement-house Build-
ing Company, I have letters dated last August, declaring
their enterprises eminently successful. There is no reason
why their experience should not be conclusive. That the
Philadelphia plan is not practicable in Xew York is not
a good reason why our own plan, which is precisely the
reverse of our neighbor's, should not be. In fact it is an
argument for its success. The very reason why we cannot
house our working masses in cottages, as has been done in
Philadelphia — viz., that they must live on Manhattan
Island, where the land is too costly for small houses — is
the best guarantee of the success of the model tenement
house, properly located and managed. The drift in tene-

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

289

ment building, as in everything else, is toward concen-
tration, and helps smooth the way. Four families on
the floor, twenty in the house, is the rule of to-day.
As the crowds increase, the need of guiding this drift
into safe channels becomes more urgent. The larger the
scale upon which the model tenement is planned, the
more certain the promise of success. The utmost ingenu-
ity cannot build a house for sixteen or twenty families on a
lot 25 x 100 feet in the middle of a block like it, that shall
give them the amount of air and sunlight to be had by the
erection of a dozen or twenty houses on a common plan
around a central yard. This was the view of the commit-
tee that awarded the prizes for the best plan for the con-
ventional tenement, ten years ago. It coupled its verdict
with the emphatic declaration that, in its view, it was " im-
possible to secure the requirements of physical and moral
health within these narrow and arbitrary limits." Houses
have been built since on better plans than any the com-
mittee saw, but its judgment stands unimpaired. A point,
too, that is not to be overlooked, is the reduced cost of
expert superintendence — the first condition of successful
management — in the larger buildings.

The Improved Dwellings Association put up its block
of thirteen houses in East Seventy-second Street nine years
ago. Their cost, estimated at about 8-^0,000 with the
land, was increased to s285,000 by troubles with the con-
tractor engaged to build them. Thus the Association's
task did not begin under the happiest auspices. Unex-
pected expenses came to deplete its treasury. The neigh-
borhood was new and not crowded at the start. No ex-
pense was spared, and the benefit of all the best and most
recent experience in tenement building was given to the
tenants. The families were provided with from two to
19

290

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

four rooms, all " outer"*' rooms, of course, at rents ranging
from §14: per month for the four on the ground floor, to
$6.25 for two rooms on the top floor. Coal lifts, ash-
chutes, common laundries in the basement, and free baths,
are features of these buildings that were then new enough
to be looked upon with suspicion by the doubting Thom-
ases who predicted disaster. There are rooms in the block
for 218 families, and when I looked in recently all but nine
of the apartments were let. One of the nine wTas rented
while I was in the building. The superintendent told me
that he had little trouble with disorderly tenants, though
the buildings shelter all sorts of people. Mr. W. Bayard
Cutting, the President of the Association, writes to me :

" By the terms of subscription to the stock before incor-
poration, dividends were limited to five per cent, on the
stock of the Improved Dwellings Association. These div-
idends have been paid (two per cent, each six months) ever
since the expiration of the first six months of the buildings
operation. All surplus has been expended upon the build-
ings. Xew and expensive roofs have been put on for the
comfort of such tenants as might choose to use them. The
buildings have been completely painted inside and out in
a manner not contemplated at the outset. An expensive
set of fire-escapes has been put on at the command of the
Fire Department, and a considerable number of other im-
provements made. I regard the experiment as eminently
successful and satisfactory , particularly when it is consid-
ered that the buildings were the first erected in this city
upon anything like a large scale, where it was proposed to
meet the architectural difficulties that present themselves
in the tenement-house problem. I have no doubt that
the experiment could be tried to-day with the improved
knowledge which has come with time, and a much larger

HOW THE CASE STANDS. 291

return be shown upon the investment. The results re-
ferred to have been attained in spite of the provision
which prevents the selling of liquor upon the Association's
premises. You are aware, of course, how much larger
rent can be obtained for a liquor saloon than for an ordi-
nary store. An investment at five per cent, net upon real
estate security worth more than the principal sum, ought
to be considered desirable."

The Tenement House Building Company made its "ex-
periment" in a much more difficult neighborhood, Cher-
ry Street, some six years later. Its houses shelter many
Russian Jews, and the difficulty of keeping them in order
is correspondingly increased, particularly as there are no
ash-chutes in the houses. It has been necessary even to
shut the children out of the yards upon which the kitchen
windows give, lest they be struck by something thrown
out by the tenants, and killed. It is the Cherry Street
style, not easily got rid of. Xevertheless, the houses are
well kept. Of the one hundred and six " apartments,"
only four were vacant in August. Professor Edwin K.
A. Seligman, the secretary of the company, writes to me :
" The tenements are now a decided success." In the
three years since they were built, they have returned an
interest of from five to five and a half per cent, on the
capital invested. The original intention of making the
tenants profit-sharers on a plan of rent insurance, under
which all earnings above four per cent, would be put to
the credit of the tenants, has not yet been carried out.

A scheme of dividends to tenants on a somewhat simi-
lar plan has been carried out by a Brooklyn builder, Mr.
A. T. White, who has devoted a life of beneficent activity
to tenement building, and whose experience, though it
has been altogether across the East River, I regard as

294

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

justly applying to New York as well. He so regards it
himself. Discussing the cost of building, he says :
" There is not the slightest reason to doubt that the finan-
cial result of a similar undertaking in any tenement-
house district of New York City would be equally good.
. . . High cost of land is no detriment, provided the
value is made by the pressure of people seeking residence
there. Rents in New York City bear a higher ratio to
Brooklyn rents than would the cost of land and building
in the one city to that in the other." The assertion that
Brooklyn furnishes a better class of tenants than the ten-
ement districts in New York would not be worth discuss-
ing seriously, even if Mr. White did not meet it himself
with the statement that the proportion of day-laborers
and sewing-women in his houses is greater than in any of
the London model tenements, showing that they reach
the humblest classes.

Mr. White has built homes for five hundred poor fami-
lies since he began his work, and has made it pay well
enough to allow good tenants a share in the profits, aver-
aging nearly one month's rent out of the twelve, as a pre-
mium upon promptness and order. The plan of his last
tenements, reproduced on p. 292, may be justly regarded
as the beau ideal of the model tenement for a great city
like New York. It embodies all the good features of Sir
Sydney Waterlow's London plan, with improvements sug-
gested by the builder's own experience. Its chief merit
is that it gathers three hundred real homes, not simply
three hundred families, under one roof. Three tenants, it
will be seen, everywhere live together. Of the rest of
the three hundred they may never know, rarely see, one.
Each has his private front-door. The common hall, with
all that it stands for, has disappeared. The fire-proof

HOAV THE CASE STANDS.

295

stairs are outside the house, a perfect fire-escape. Each
tenant has his own scullery and ash-flue. There are no
air-shafts, for they are not needed. Every room, under
the admirable arrangement of the plan, looks out either
upon the street or the yard, that is nothing less than a
great park with a play-ground set apart for the children,
where they may dig in the sand to their heart's content.
Weekly concerts are given in the park by a brass band.
The drying of clothes is done on the roof, where racks
are fitted up for the purpose. The outside stairways end
in turrets that give the buildings a very smart appearance.
Mr. White never has any trouble with his tenants, though
he gathers in the poorest ; nor do his tenements have any-
thing of the "institution character" that occasionally at-
taches to ventures of this sort, to their damage. They are
like a big village of contented people, who live in peace
with one another because they have elbow-room even un-
der one big roof.

Enough has been said to show that model tenements
can be built successfully and made to pay in Xew York,
if the owner will be content with the five or six per cent,
he does not even dream of when investing his funds in
" governments " at three or four. It is true that in the
latter case he has only to cut off his coupons and cash
them. But the extra trouble of looking after his tene-
ment property, that is the condition of his highest and
lasting success, is the penalty exacted for the sins of our
fathers that " shall be visited upon the children, unto the
third and fourth generation." We shall indeed be well
off, if it stop there. I fear there is too much reason to
believe that our own inicpities must be added to transmit
the curse still further. And yet, such is the leavening in-
fluence of a good deed in that dreary desert of sin and

296

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.

suffering, that the erection of a single good tenement has
the power to change, gradually but surely, the character
of a whole bad block. It sets up a standard to which the
neighborhood must rise, if it cannot succeed in dragging
it down to its own low level.

And so this task, too, has come to an end. Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap. I have aimed to
tell the truth as I saw it. If this book shall have borne
ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice, it
has served its purpose. While I was writing these lines I
went down to the sea, where thousands from the city
were enjoying their summer rest. The ocean slumbered
under a cloudless sky. Gentle waves washed lazily over
the white sand, where children fled before them with
screams of laughter. Standing there and watching their
play, I was told that during the fierce storms of winter it
happened that this sea, now so calm, rose in rage and
beat down, broke over the bluff, sweeping all before it.
Xo barrier built by human hands had power to stay it
then. The sea of a mighty population, held in galling
fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. Once already
our city, to which have come the duties and responsibili-
ties of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly
measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood.
If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check
it. The gap between the classes in which it surges, un-
seen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening day by
day. iso tardy enactment of law, no political expedient,
can close it. Against all other dangers our system of gov-
ernment may offer defence and shelter ; against this not.
I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a
bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts.

HOW THE CASE STANDS.

297

I believe that the danger of such conditions as are fast
growing up around us is greater for the very freedom
which they mock. The words of the poet, with whose
lines I prefaced this book, are truer to-day, have far
deeper meaning to us, than when they were penned forty
years ago :

" — Think ye that building shall endure
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor ? "

APPENDIX.

STATISTICS BEAKIXG ON THE TENEMENT PEOBLEM.

Statistics of population were left out of the text in the hope
that the results of this year's census would be available as a basis
for calculation before the book went to press. They are now at
hand, but their correctness is disputed. The statisticians of the
Health Department claim that New York's population has been
underestimated a hundred thousand at least, and they appear to
have the best of the argument. A re-count is called for, and the
printer will not wait. Such statistics as follow have been based on
the Health Department estimates, except where the census source
is given. The extent of the quarrel of official figures may be judged
from this one fact, that the ordinarily conservative and careful cal-
culations of the Sanitary Bureau make the death-rate of New
YorL: in 1889, 25.19 for the thousand of a population of 1,575,073,
while the census would make it 26.76 in a population of 1,482,273.

Population of New York, 1880 (census) 1,206,299

London, 1881 " 3,816,483

Philadelphia, 1880 " 846,980

Brooklyn, 1880 " 566,689

Boston* 1880 " 362,535

New York, 1889 (estimated) 1,575,073

London, 1889 " 4,351,738

Philadelphia, 1889 " 1,040,245

Brooklyn, " " 814,505

Boston, " " 420,000

' < New York under five years of age, in 1880 140,327
a « « " " 1889

'(estimated) 182,770

300

APPENDIX.

Population of tenements in New York in 1869* (census). 468,492

" " " 1888 f " 1,093,701
" " " " " under five

years of age 143,243

Population of New York in 1880 (census) 1,206,299

Manhattan Island in 1880 (census) 1,164,673

Tenth Ward in 1880 (census) 47,554

Eleventh Ward " " 68,778

" Thirteenth Ward in 1880 (census) 37,797

New York in 1890 (census) 1,513,501

" Manhattan Island in 1890 (census) 1,440,101

' ' Tenth Ward in 1890 (census) 57,514

Eleventh Ward " " 75,708

Thirteenth Ward in 1890 (census) 45,882

Number of acres in New York City 24,890

Manhattan Island 12,673

Tenth Ward 110

Eleventh Ward 196

Thirteenth Ward 107

Density of population per acre in 1880, New York City. 48.4
Density of population per acre in 1880, Manhattan

Island 92.6

Density of population per acre in 1880, Tenth Ward. . . 432.3

Density of population per acre in 1880, Eleventh Ward 350.9

Density of population per acre in 1880, Thirteenth Ward 353.2
Density of population per acre in 1890, New York City

(census) 60.08

Density of population per acre in 1890, Manhattan

Island (census) 114.53

Density of population per acre in 1890, Tenth Ward

(census) 522.00

Density of population per acre in 1890, Eleventh Ward

(census) 386.00

Density of population per acre in 1890, Thirteenth Ward

(census) 428.8

Density of population to the square mile in 1880, New

York City (census) 30,976

* In 18fi9a tenement was a house occupied by four families or more,
t In 1888, a tenement was a house occupied by three families or more.

APPENDIX. 301

Density of population to the square mile in 1880, Man-
hattan Island (census) -41,264:

Density of population to the square mile in 1880, Tenth

Ward (census) 276,672

Density of population to the square mile in 1880, Elev-
enth Ward (census) 224,576

Density of population to the square mile in 1880, Thir-
teenth Ward (census) 226,048

Density of population to the square mile in 1890, New

York City (census) 38,451

Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Man-
hattan Island (census) 73,299

Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Tenth

Ward (census) 334,080

Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Elev-
enth Ward (census) 246,040

Density of population to the square mile in 1890, Thir-
teenth Ward (census) 274,432

Number of persons to a dwelling in New York, 1880

(census) 16.37

Number of persons to a dwelling in London, 1881 (cen-
sus) 7.9

Number of persons to a dwelling in Philadelphia, 1880

(census) 5.79

Number of persons to a dwelling in Brooklyn, 1880

(census) 9.11

Number of persons to a dwelling in Boston, 1880 (cen-
sus) 8.26

Number of deaths in New York, 1880 31,937

London, 1881...! 81,431

Philadelphia, 1880 17,711

Brooklyn, 1880 13,222

Boston, 1880 8,612

Death-rate of New York, 1880 26.47

London, 1881 21.3

Philadelphia, 1880 20.91

Brooklyn, 1880 23.33

Boston, 1880 23.75

Number of deaths in New York, 1889 39,679

302

APPENDIX.

Number of deaths in London, 1889 75,683

Philadelphia, 1889 20,536.

Brooklyn, 1889 18,288"

Boston, 1889 10,259

Death-rate of New York, 1889 25.19

London, 1889 17.4

Philadelphia, 1889 19.7

Brooklyn, 1889 22.5

Boston^ 1889 24.42

For every person who dies there are always two disabled by ill-
ness, so that there was a regular average of 79,358 New Yorkers
on the sick-list at any moment last year. It is usual to count 28
cases of sickness the year round for every death, and this would
give a total for the year 1889 of 1,111,082 of illness of all sorts.

Number of deaths in tenements in New York, 1869 13,285

1888 24,842

Death-rate in tenements in New York, 1869 28.35

1888 22.71

This is exclusive of deaths in institutions, properly referable to
the tenements in most cases. The adult death-rate is found to
decrease in the larger tenements of newer construction. The
child mortality increases, reaching 114.04 per cent, of 1,000 living
in houses containing between 60 and 80 tenants. From this point
it decreases with the adult death-rate.

Number of deaths in prisons, New York, 1889 85

hospitals, New York, 1889 6,102

lunatic asylums, New York, 1889 .... 448
" " institutions for children, New York,

1889 522

homes for aged, New York, 1889 238

Mmshouse, New York, 1889 424

" " other institutions, New York, 1889. . 162
Number of burials in city cemetery (paupers), New York,

1889 3,815

Percentage of such burials on total 9.64

APPENDIX.

303

Number of tenants weeded out of overcrowded tenements,

New York, 1889 1,246

Number of tenants weeded out of overcrowded tenements,

in first half of 1890* 1,068

Number of sick poor visited by summer corps of doctors,

New York, 1890 16,501

Police Statistics.

Males. Females.

Arrests made by the police in 1889 62,274 19,926

Number of arrests for drunkenness and disor-
derly conduct 20,253 8,981

Number of arrests for disorderly conduct 10,953 7,477

" " assault and battery 4,534 497

theft 4,399 721

" robbery 247 10

" " vagrancy 1,686 947

Prisoners unable to read or write 2,399 1,281

Number of lost children found in the streets, 1889 2,968

" sick and destitute cared for, 1889 2,753

Found sick in the streets 1,211

Number of pawnshops in city, 1889 110

" cheap lodging-houses, 1889 270

saloons, 1889 7,884

Immigration.

Immigrants landed at Castle Garden in 20 years, ending

with 1889 5,335,396

Immigrants landed at Castle Garden in 1889 349,233

Immigrants from England landed at Castle Garden in

1889 46,214

Immigrants from Scotland landed at Castle Garden in

1889 1M15

Immigrants from Ireland landed at Castle Garden in

1889 43,090

Immigrants from Germany landed at Castle Garden in

1889 75,458

* These figures represent less than two hundred of the worst tenements below Hous.
ton Street.

304

APPENDIX.

1883.

1884.

1885.

1886.

1887.

1888.

1889.

Italy

25,485

14,076

16,033

29,312

44,274

43,927

28,810

Russia ^

7,577

12,432

16,578

23,987

33,203

33,052

31,329

13,160

15,797

11,129

18.135

17,719

12,905

15,678

4,877

7,093

6,697

4,222

6,449

3,982

5,412

Tenements.

Number of tenements in New York, December 1, 1888. 32,390

Number built from June 1, 1888, to August 1, 1890 3,733

Bear tenements in existence, August 1, 1890 2,630

Total number of tenements, August 1, 1890 37,316

Estimated population of tenements, August 1, 1890. . . 1,250,000
Estimated number of children under five years in tene-
ments, 1890 163,712

Corner tenements may cover all of the lot, except 4 feet at
the rear. Tenements in the block may only cover seventy-eight
per cent, of the lot. They must have a rear yard 10 feet wide, and
air-shafts or open courts equal to twelve per cent, of the lot.

Tenements or apartment houses must not be built over 70 feet
high in streets 60 feet wide.

Tenements or apartment houses must not be built over 80 feet
high in streets wider than 60 feet.

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